Flannery O’Connor
THE COMPLETE STORIES
Contents:
A Late Encounter with the Enemy
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead
Introduction
Flannery O’Connor’s first book has never, up to now, been published. It was entitled The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories and consists of the first six stories in this volume. The title page of the original manuscript, in the library of the University of Iowa, bears the legend, “A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, in the Department of English, in the Graduate College of the State University of Iowa.” It is dated June 1947 and a separate page carries a dedication to her teacher, Paul Engle.
At their first meeting in his office, in 1946, Mr. Engle recalls, he was unable to understand a word of Flannery’s native Georgian tongue: “Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. She wrote: ‘My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer’s Workshop?’… I told her to bring examples of her writing and we would consider her, late as it was. Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself. For a few weeks we had this strange and yet trusting relationship. Soon I understood those Georgia pronunciations.
The stories were quietly filled with insight, shrewd about human weakness, hard and compassionate… She was shy about having them read, and when it was her turn to have a story presented in the Workshop, I would read it aloud anonymously.
Robert Penn Warren was teaching a semester while Flannery was at the University of Iowa; there was a scene about a black and a white man, and Warren criticized it… It was changed. Flannery, in a letter to Robert Giroux dated July 13, 1971, always had a flexible and objective view of her own writing, constantly revising, and in every case improving. The will to be a writer was adamant; nothing could resist it, not even her own sensibility about her own work. Cut, alter, try it again… Sitting at the back of the room, silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing-class with their loudness.
The only communicating gesture she would make was an occasional amused and shy smile at something absurd. The dreary chair she sat in glowed.
The publishing career of this unknown writer of twenty-one had already started. Flannery mailed “The Geranium” to the editors of Accent as early as February 1946. We are indebted to Daniel Curley, former editor of Accent for verifying this date. They accepted it at once and printed it in their summer issue. On the basis of the stories she later incorporated into her novel-in-progress, Wise Blood, Mr. Engle recommended her for a prize offered by a publisher for a first novel.
In the spring of 1947 she was awarded this prizes—the sum of $750, which was to serve as part of the advance against royalties if the publisher ultimately accepted the novel.
Flannery received her master’s degree that summer; Sewanee Review published “The Train” the next spring; in June 1948 she took the important and crucial step of finding a literary agent and a lifelong friend, Elizabeth McKee. Miss McKee placed her story “The Capture” (entitled “The Turkey” in the thesis) with Mademoiselle in November. It was shortly after this—I was not the publisher involved with the prize—that I met Flannery O’Connor.
Robert Lowell brought her into my office late in February 1949.
They had come to New York from Yaddo, the writer’s colony at Saratoga Springs, where Flannery worked on Wise Blood and Lowell on his poems. Behind her soft-spoken speech, clear-eyed gaze and shy manner, I sensed a tremendous strength. This was the rarest kind of young writer, one who was prepared to work her utmost and knew exactly what she must do with her talent. I rather regretted, as a publisher, meeting such an interesting writer at the start of a career in which I could play no part. She told me she was committed elsewhere, and if I knew anything it was that she would honor her commitment. She asked about a new writer I had recently published—Thomas Merton; I gave her a copy of The Seven Storey Mountain to take with her to her mother’s house in Milledgeville, Georgia. Later I heard that she would be coming north again to live in Connecticut with my friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald and I hoped I’d have the opportunity to know her better.
It was not until after her death in 1964 that I learned exactly how her publishing fate took an unexpected turn. (Our later publishing relationship also developed surprisingly, and I’ll come to that.)
The details are fully and rather comically recorded in her correspondence with Elizabeth McKee, who gave me copies of the letters before she added the originals to the papers that Flannery’s mother, Regina O’Connor, is collecting. The excerpts from Flannery’s letters are quoted here with the permission of her literary executor, Robert Fitzgerald.
In her first letter (June 19, 1948) to Miss McKee, Flannery revealed she had been working on the novel “a year and a half and will probably be two more years finishing it.” She described her writing habits in a letter dated July 13: “I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again. I am working on the twelfth chapter now. I long ago quit numbering the pages but I suppose I am past the 50,000 word mark. Of the twelve chapters only a few won’t have to be rewritten, and I can’t exhibit such formless stuff. It would discourage me to look at it right now and anyway I yearn to go about my business to the end.”
At the end of the year, when she was worried about money, her agent advised her to submit the new chapters in order to get a definite commitment and perhaps a further advance. From Yaddo, December 15, 1948: “Perhaps I shall get down [to New York] in January and perhaps before that send you the chapters I am working on… I have decided, however, that no good comes of sending anything off in a hurry.” On January 20, 1949, Flannery wrote: “Here are the first nine chapters which please show [the publisher] and let us be on with financial thoughts. They are, of course, not finished but they are finished enough for the present… ” When there was no response by February 5: “I’ll be anxious to hear the outcome…”
She heard it on February 16 and it was not to her liking. One can sympathize with the publisher’s problem at this early stage of composition. Wise Blood was a strange book, as Flannery would have been the first to acknowledge. What she could not accept was the tone of the publisher’s letter. He said he thought she was a pretty straight shooter, that she had an astonishing gift, but that some aspects of the book were obscured by her habit of rewriting over and over again. To be honest, he added, he sensed a kind of aloneness in the book, as if she were writing out of her own experience, and consciously limiting this experience. He wished she would sit down and tell him what was what. He hoped she didn’t mind his forthright letter.
Flannery wrote at once to Miss McKee: “Please tell me what is behind this Sears-Roebuck Straight Shooter approach. I presume… either that [the publisher] will not take the novel as it will be if left to my fiendish care (it will be essentially as it is), or that [the publisher] would like to rescue it at this point and train it into a conventional novel… The letter is addressed to a slightly dimwitted Campfire Girl, and I cannot look forward with composure to a lifetime of others like them.”
At the same time, in an effort to honor her commitment, she answered the publisher’s letter next day: “I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer… I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from… In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you now have.”
Matters had not improved much by the following April, when she wrote Paul Engle to tell him that “other publishers who have read the two printed chapters”—she was referring to “The Train” and to the publication that winter of “The Heart of the Park” in Partisan Review—”are interested.” She also told him about her meeting with the dissatisfied publisher, at which he “and I came to the conclusion that I was ‘prematurely arrogant.’ I supplied him with the phrase.” She thought that “no one will understand my need to work this novel out in my own way better than you, although you may feel that I should work faster. I work ALL the time, but I cannot work fast. No one can convince me I shouldn’t rewrite as much as I do.” She concluded with the news that she had been turned down for the Guggenheim fellowship for which Mr. Engle had recommended her. (Her other sponsors were Robert Lowell, Philip Rahv and Robert Penn Warren.)
I met her again in May 1950, at the christening of Maria Juliana Fitzgerald in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I noted what good spirits Flannery was in, as we gravely performed our roles as godparents, renouncing the devil and all his works and pomps. (It is to be regretted that she did not live to see our godchild become Sister Mary Julian in 1970.) She told me she was still working hard on the novel and was still committed to her publisher, though her literary agent soon informed me that the submission of additional chapters had not allayed his doubts. Finally, in October, after she had obtained a release from him, I offered and she signed a contract for Wise Blood.
The strength I sensed in Flannery at our first meeting now had an incredible strain put on it. She was stricken with lupus on her journey home for Christmas, and spent nine months, desperately ill, in and out of Emory Hospital in Atlanta. On her release she was unable to climb stairs, and Regina O’Connor then decided to move to “Andalusia,” their country place five miles from town, which was to be their home and Flannery’s refuge from then on. By the following September Flannery was writing Miss McKee, “The last time I saw Bob Giroux, he said we would push the date of delivery of the manuscript up to the first of the year (1951) but that there was nothing magic in that date. There is nothing magic in my speed or progress at this time, but I don’t know anything for it. I plan to last until the first of the year and then see what I’ve got.” A full year later (September 1, 1951) she wrote Miss McKee from Milledgeville: “Bob Giroux and Caroline Gordon made some suggestions for improving my book and I have been working on these and have by now about come up with another draft of it.”
By the end of the year the novel was ready, and we began to prepare for publication. Flannery had less vanity than anyone I have ever known. When I asked her for a photograph to use on the book jacket, I expected a picture taken before her illness. The new one she sent was not unattractive, and she looked out at the reader with that clear-eyed gaze of hers, but her hair had not fully grown back nor had the puffiness induced by cortisone wholly subsided. The photograph was widely reproduced when Wise Blood was published in May 1952. I was disappointed by the reviews more than she was; they all recognized her power but missed her point.
In the five years between 1947, when a draft of the first chapter of Wise Blood was written, and 1952, Flannery’s development was amazing. In the three years following, she wrote better and better.
Starting late in 1952 with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a masterpiece of a story, she turned out one beauty after another, including “The River,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger” and “Good Country People.” Catherine Carver, whom we were fortunate enough to have as an editor, and who worked with Flannery at this period, brought each new story into my office with more or less the same remark, “Wait till you read this one!” Early in 1955 Flannery completed work on her second book, a collection of these stories which she entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find. In January we sent it to press, having set publication for June. I remember our amusement at Evelyn Waugh’s reaction to the advance proofs we sent him: “If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable.” At the beginning of April, before the book appeared, I resigned from the firm and joined the house with which I have since been associated. When Flannery sent me an inscribed copy, soon after my departure, I felt a twinge of sadness that my editorial association with her books had ended.
Once again fate rearranged what seemed to be an unalterable course. After the very successful publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery was offered a new contract about which she asked my advice, saying she wanted to stay as long as Catherine Carver remained as her editor. In that case, I suggested, why not ask that such a stipulation be incorporated in the contract? This was not readily granted, but Flannery had made up her mind and in the end she got what she wanted. Within three years, after Catherine Carver and Denver Lindley had left, it came to pass that Flannery was free to join the house she remained with until her death. We contracted for her third book, “a novel in progress,” on April 15, 1958, and published The Violent Bear It Away in 1960. Then I learned that Wise Blood was out of print, and we soon acquired this classic work.
She wrote a short and eloquent preface for the second edition, describing the book as “a comic novel about a Christian malgre lui” and stating that it had been written by “an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.”
She ended by defining her theme, free will or freedom, as “a mystery, and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.” We reissued Wise Blood in 1962, on the tenth anniversary of the original publication, and it lives on both in cloth and paperback editions. Didn’t some wise man define a classic as a book that does not stay out of print?
One of Flannery’s admirers was Thomas Merton, who became more of a fan with each new book of hers. Over the years I came to see how much the two had in common—a highly developed sense of comedy, deep faith, great intelligence. The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident. It was their metier, in which they refined and deepened their very different talents in a short span of time. They both died at the height of their powers.
Finally, they were both as American as one can be. When publication of Merton’s The Sign of Jonas was forbidden by the Abbot General in France, I was able to obtain its release only with the help of Jacques Maritain, who wrote him in beautiful French (the Abbot General did not read English and consequently had not read The Sign of Jonas), explaining what the “American Trappist” was up to.
As for Flannery, whose work can only be understood in an American setting, when a German publisher wanted to drop some of her stories as too shocking for Germanic sensibilities, she wrote Miss McKee, “I didn’t think I was that vicious.”
On a trip south in 1959 I stopped at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to see Merton, before going to see Flannery in Georgia.
He gave me a presentation copy of the beautifully designed private edition of Prometheus: A Meditation to take to her. He was much interested in Flannery’s peacocks. From previous visits to “Andalusia” I was able to tell him about their habits—how they roost at dusk by gradual hops from ground to fence post to tree limb; how their trains get caught under car wheels because they refuse to hurry; how vain they are (they seemed to jockey for good angles when they saw my camera); how funny it is to see peachicks rehearsing with their immature featherduster tails; and how rare it is to see the ultimate display, when the peacock shimmers and shakes his feathers in a kind of ecstasy at the height of preening I could not tell Merton enough about them or about Flannery and her surroundings. What was Milledgeville like? Well, one of its sights was the beautiful ante-bellum Cline house, where Flannery’s aunt served a formal midday dinner. He was surprised to learn that far from being “backwoods” Milledgeville had once been the capital of Georgia. I also showed him a letter in which Flannery wrote: “Somebody sent me a gossip column that said Gene Kelly would make his TV debut in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘backwoods love story’ [The Life You Save May Be Your Own]. I certainly can’t afford to miss this metamorphosis.”
When I got to the O’Connors’, Flannery was curious to hear about Gethsemani. Was Merton allowed to talk to me? Yes, without restriction. I described our walks in the woods and the monastic routine of the day: first office (Matins) at two a. m. and last office (Compline) at sunset, followed by bed. I mentioned that in Louisville I’d bought Edith Sitwell’s recording of Facade, which Merton played over and over, laughing so hard that tears ran down his cheeks, and Flannery asked me to recite some of the poems. Even my pallid approximation of Dame Edith’s renderings of “Daisy and Lily, lazy and silly”,“Long Steel Grass” (pronounced “Grawss”), “Black Mrs. Behemoth” and the rest made her face light up with smiles.
When Flannery died, Merton was not exaggerating his estimate of her worth when he said he would not compare her with such good writers as Hemingway, Porter and Sartre but rather with “someone like Sophocles… I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.”
Up to the very end, she worked hard. She was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge during her final illness. “I have been thinking about this collection of my stories and what can be done to get it out with me sick,” she wrote Miss McKee on May 7, 1964.
“I am definitely out of commission for the summer and maybe longer with this lupus. I have to stay mostly in bed… If I were well there is a lot of rewriting and polishing I could do, but in my present state of health [the stories] are essentially all right the way they are.” This is a typical O’Connor understatement; some of these last stories, like “Revelation” and the title story, are as nearly perfect as stories can be. In the same letter she proposed eight stories for the book, one of which, “The Partridge Festival,” she later withdrew.
All eight had appeared in magazines. Later in May she wrote, “I forgot to tell Bob Giroux that the title Everything That Rises Must Converge is all right with me if he thinks that is what it ought to be.” It seemed absolutely right and (though she never said so) may have dated from a few years earlier when I sent her a French anthology of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, one section of which was entitled Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge. I was unaware of the two unpublished stories she was working on.
The first of these new stories was “Parker’s Back.” Caroline Gordon later wrote of it: “Miss O’Connor’s stories are all about the operations of supernatural grace in the lives of natural men and women. Such operations are infinitely various but so delicate that they have eluded some of the subtlest writers. In ‘Parker’s Back,’ Miss O’Connor seems to have succeeded where the great Flaubert failed: in the dramatization of that particular heresy which denies Our Lord corporeal substance. We do not naturally like anything which is unfamiliar. No wonder Miss O’Connor’s writings have baffled the reviewers, so much so they have reached for any cliche they could lay hold of in order to have some way of apprehending this original and disturbing work.”
The final story, “Judgement Day,” was mailed to me in early July. It is a revised and expanded version of “The Geranium,” which appears to have been a favorite of hers, for letters to Miss McKee reveal that in 1955 she had also worked on an intermediate version under the title “An Exile in the East.” As “Judgement Day” it became the ninth story in the collection published posthumously in 1965. What turned out to be my last letter to Flannery was dated July 7, 1964. I knew of the recurrence of her illness, of course, but I did not know that the lupus was now uncontrolled. I enclosed with my letter an advance proof of our catalogue description of Everything That Rises Must Converge as it was then conceived. She never replied and in late July she was taken to the Baldwin County hospital at Milledgeville, where she died in a coma on August 3. There are thirty-one stories in this volume. Nineteen are taken from Flannery’s two collections and twelve appear for the first time in book form. For this edition we have followed the author’s original manuscripts for “The Partridge Festival,”
“Why Do the Heathen Rage?” and the first six stories. For the latter group we have also retained the order she followed in her thesis. The order of the other stories is chronological according to date of composition and does not duplicate the arrangement the author worked out for the two collections, which are of course available as she wanted them.
Nor is it implied that all the stories here are of equal merit. It simply seems desirable to preserve as complete a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction as possible.
Elizabeth Bishop, who with her poet’s eye sees more than most of us, wrote at the time of Flannery’s death: “I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases, and an odd insight that contains more real poetry than a dozen books of poems.” She added a bit of testimony that Flannery herself would have relished: “Critics who accuse her of exaggeration are quite wrong, I think. I lived in Florida for several years next to a flourishing ‘Church of God’ (both white and black congregation), where every Wednesday night Sister Mary and her husband spoke in tongues.’ After those Wednesday nights, nothing Flannery O’Connor ever wrote could seem at all exaggerated to me.”
The Geranium (1946)
OLD DUDLEY folded into the chair he was gradually molding to his own shape and looked out the window fifteen feet away into another window framed by blackened red brick. He was waiting for the geranium. They put it out every morning about ten and they took it in at five-thirty. Mrs. Carson back home had a geranium in her window. There were plenty of geraniums at home, better-looking geraniums. Ours are sho nuff geraniums, Old Dudley thought, not any er this pale pink business with green, paper bows.
The geranium they would put in the window reminded him of the Grisby boy at home who had polio and had to be wheeled out every morning and left in the sun to blink. Lutisha could have taken that geranium and stuck it in the ground and had something worth looking at in a few weeks. Those people across the alley had no business with one. They set it out and let the hot sun bake it all day and they put it so near the ledge the wind could almost knock it over. They had no business with it, no business with it. It shouldn’t have been there. Old Dudley felt his throat knotting up. Lutish could root anything. Rabie too. His throat was drawn taut. He laid his head back and tried to clear his mind. There wasn’t much he could think of to think about that didn’t do his throat that way.
His daughter came in. “Don’t you want to go for a walk?” she asked. She looked provoked.
He didn’t answer her.
“Well?”
“No.” He wondered how long she was going to stand there. She made his. eves feel like his throat. They’d get watery and she’d see. She had seen before and had looked sorry for him. She’d looked sorry for herself too; but she could er saved herself, Old Dudley thought, if she’d just have let him alone—let him stay where he was back home and not be so taken up with her damn duty. She moved out of the room, leaving an audible sigh, to crawl over him and remind him again of that one minute—that wasn’t her fault at all—when suddenly he had wanted to go to New York to live with her.
He could have got out of going. He could have been stubborn and told her he’d spend his life where he’d always spent it, send him or not send him the money every month, he’d get along with his pension and odd jobs. Keep her damn money—she needed it worse than he did. She would have been glad to have had her duty disposed of like that. Then she could have said if he died without his children near him, it was his own fault; if he got sick and there wasn’t anybody to take care of him, well, he’d asked for it, she could have said. But there was that thing inside him that had wanted to see New York. He had been to Atlanta once when he was a boy and he had seen New York in a picture show. Big Town Rhythm it was. Big towns were important places. The thing inside him had sneaked up on him for just one instant. The ‘place like he’d seen in the picture show had room for him! It was an important place and it had room for him! He’d said yes, he’d go.
He must have been sick when he said it. He couldn’t have been well and said it. He had been sick and she had been so taken up with her damn duty, she had wangled it out of him. Why did she ha ve to come down there in the first place to pester him? He had been doing all right. There was his pension that could feed him and odd jobs that kept him his room in the boarding house. The window in that room showed him the river-thick and red as it struggled over rocks and around curves. He tried to think how it was besides red and slow. He added green brotches for trees on either side of it and a brown spot for trash somewhere upstream. He and Rabie had fished it in a flat-bottom boat every Wednesday. Rabie knew the river up and. down for twenty miles. There wasn’t another nigger in Coa County that knew it like he did. He loved the river, but it hadn’t meant any’thing to Old Dudley. The fish were what he was after. He liked to come in at night with a long string of them and slap them down in the sink. “Few fish I got,” he’d say. It took a man to get those fish, the old girls at the boarding house always said. He and Rabie would start out early Wednesday morning and fish all day. Rabiewould find the spots and row; Old Dudley always caught them. Rabie didn’t care much about catching them—he just loved—the river. “Ain’t no use settin’ yo’ line down dere, boss,” he’d say. “Ain’t no fish dere. Dis ol’ riber ain’t hidin’ none nowhere ‘round hyar, nawsuh.” And he would giggle and shift the boat downstream. That was Rabie. He could steal cleaner than a weasel but he knew where the fish were. Old Dudley always gave him the little ones.
Old Dudley had lived upstairs in the corner room of the boarding house ever since his wife died in ‘22. He protected the old ladies. He was the man in the house and he did the things a man in the house was supposed to do. It was a dull occupation at night when the old girls crabbed and crocheted in the parlor and the rran in the house had to listen and judge the sparrow-like wars that rasped and twittered intermittently. But in the daytime there was Rabie. Rabie and Lutisha lived down in the basement. Lutish cooked and Rabie took care of the cleaning and the vegetable garden; but he was sharp at sneaking off with half his work done and going to help Old Dudley with some current project—building a hen house or painting a door. He liked to listen, he liked to hear about Atlanta when Old Dudley had been there and about how guns were put together on the inside and all the other things the old man knew.
Sometimes at night they would go ‘possum hunting. They never got a ‘possum but Old Dudley liked to get away from the ladies once in a while and hunting was a good excuse. Rabie didn’t like ‘possum hunting. They never got a ‘possum; they never even treed one; and besides, he was mostly a water nigger. “We ain’t gonna go huntin’ no ‘possum tonight, is we, boss? I got a lil’ business I wants tuh tend tuh,” he’d say when Old Dudley would start talking about hounds and guns. “Whose chickens you gonna steal tonight?” Dudley would grin. “I reckon I be huntin’ ‘possum tonight,” Rabie’d sigh.
Old Dudley would get out his gun and take it apart and, as Rabie cleaned the pieces, would explain the mechanism to him. Then he’d put it together again. Rabie always marveled at the way he could put it together again. Old Dudley would have liked to have explained New York to Rabie. If he could have showed it to Rabie, it wouldn’t have been so big—he wouldn’t have felt pressed down every time he went out in it. “It ain’t so big,” he would have said. “Don’t let it get you down, Rabie. It’s just like any other city and cities ain’t all that complicated.”
But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a building—the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened—red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he’d been dazed by the building the first week. He’d wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he’d look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he’d be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building—nowhere.
The next week he had become more conscious of the daughter and son-in-law and their boy—no place to be out of their way. The son-in-law was a queer one. He drove a truck and came in only on the weekends. He said “nah” for “no” and he’d never heard of a ‘possum. Old Dudley slept in the room with the boy, who was sixteen and couldn’t be talked to. But sometimes when the daughter and Old Dudley were alone in the apartment, she would sit down and talk to him. First she had to think of something to say. Usually it gave out before what she considered was the proper time to get up and do something else, so he would have to say something. He always tried to think of something he hadn’t said before. She never listened the second time. She was seeing that her father spent his last years with his own family and not in a decayed boarding house full of old women whose heads jiggled. She was doing her duty. She had brothers and sisters who were not.
Once she took him shopping with her but he was too slow. They went in a “subway”—a railroad underneath the ground like a big cave. People boiled out of trains and up steps and over into the streets. They rolled off the street and down steps and into trains black and white and yellow all mixed up like vegetables in soup. Everything was boiling. The trains swished in from tunnels, up canals, and all of a sudden stopped. The people coming out pushed through the people coming in and a noise rang and the train swooped off again. Old Dudley and the daughter had to go in three different ones before they got where they were going. He wondered why people ever went out of their houses. He felt like his tongue had slipped down in his stomach. She held him by the coat sleeve and pulled him through the people.
They went on an overhead train too. She called it an “El,” They had to go up on a high platform to catch it. Old Dudley looked over the rail and could see the people rushing and the automobiles rushing under him. He felt sick. He put one hand on the rail and sank down on the wooden floor of the platform. The daughter screamed and pulled him over from the edge. “Do you want to fall off and kill yourself?” she shouted.
Through a crack in the boards he could see the cars swimming in the street. “I don’t care,” he murmured, “I don’t care if I do or not.”
“Come on,” she said, “you’ll feel better when we get home.”
“Home?” he repeated. The cars moved in a rhythm below him.
“Come on,” she said, “here it comes; we’ve just got time to make it.” They’d just had time to make all of them.
They made that one. They came back to the building and the apartment. The apartment was too tight. There was no place to be where there wasn’t somebody else. The kitchen opened into the bathroom and the bathroom opened into everything else and you were always where you started from. At home there was upstairs and the basement and the river and downtown in front of Fraziers … damn his throat.
The geranium was late today. It was ten-thirty. They usually had it out by ten-fifteen.
Somewhere down the hall a woman shrilled something unintelligible out to the street; a radio was bleating the worn music to a soap serial; and a garbage can crashed down a fire escape. The door to the next apartment slammed and a sharp footstep clipped down the hall. “That would be the nigger,” Old Dudley muttered. “The nigger with the shiny shoes.” He had been there a week when the nigger moved in. That Thursday he was looking out the door at the dog—run halls when this nigger went into the next apartment. He had on a gray, pin-stripe suit and a tan tie. His collar was stiff and white and made a clear-cut line next to his neck. His shoes were shiny tan—they matched his tie and his skin. Old Dudley scratched his head. He hadn’t known the kind of people that would live thick in a building could afford servants. He chuckled. Lot of good a nigger in a Sunday suit would do them. Maybe this nigger would know the country around here—or maybe how to get to it. They might could hunt. They might could find them a stream somewhere. He shut the door and went to the daughter’s room. “Hey!” he shouted, “the folks next door got ‘em a nigger. Must be gonna clean for them. You reckon they gonna keep him every day?”
She looked up from making the bed. “What are you talking about?”
“I say they got ‘em a servant next door—a nigger—all dressed up in a Sunday suit.”
She walked to the other side of the bed. “You must be crazy,” she said. “The next apartment is vacant and besides, nobody around here can afford any servant.”
“I tell you I saw him,” Old Dudley snickered. “Going right in there with a tie and a white collar on—and sharp-toed shoes.”
“If he went in there, he’s looking at it for himself,” she muttered. She went to the dresser and started fidgeting with things.
Old Dudley laughed. She could be right funny when she wanted to. “Well,” he said, “I think I’ll go over and see what day he gets off. Maybe I can convince him he likes to fish,” and he’d slapped his pocket to make the two quarters jingle. Before he got out in the hall good, she came tearing behind him and pulled him in. “Can’t you hear?” she’d yelled. “I meant what I said. He’s renting that himself if he went in there. Don’t you go asking him any questions or saying anything to him. I don’t want any trouble with niggers.”
“You mean,” Old Dudley murmured, “he’s gonna live next door to you?”
She shrugged. “I suppose he is. And you tend to your own business,” she added. “Don’t have anything to do with him.”
That’s just the way she’d said it. Like he didn’t have any sense at all. But he’d told her off then. He’d stated his say and she knew what he meant. “You ain’t been raised that way!” he’d said thundery-like. “You ain’t been raised to live tight with niggers that think they’re just as good as you, and you think I’d go messin’ around with one er that kind! If you think I want anything to do with them, you’re crazy.” He had had to slow down then because his throat was tightening. She’d stood stiff up and said they lived where they could afford to live and made the best of it. Preaching to him! Then she’d walked stiff off without a word more. That was her. Trying to be holy with her shoulders curved around and her neck in the air. Like he was a fool. He knew Yankees let niggers in their front doors and let them set on their sofas but he didn’t know his own daughter that was raised proper would stay next door to them—and then think he didn’t have no more sense than to want to mix with them. Him!
He got up and took a paper off another chair. He might as well appear to be reading when she came through again. No use having her standing up there staring at him, believing she had to think up something for him to do. He looked over the paper at the window across the alley. The geranium wasn’t there yet. It had never been this late before. The first day he’d seen it, he had been sitting there looking out the window at the other window and he had looked at his watch to see how long it had been since breakfast.
When he looked up, it was there. It startled him. He didn’t like flowers, but the geranium didn’t look like a flower. It looked like the sick Grisby boy at home and it was the color of the drapes the old ladies had in the parlor and the paper bow on it looked like the one behind Lutish’s uniform she wore on Sundays. Lutish had a fondness for sashes. Most niggers did, Old Dudley thought.
The daughter came through again. He had meant to be looking at the paper when she came through. “Do me a favor, will you?” she asked as if she had just thought up a favor he could do.
He hoped she didn’t want him to go to the grocery again. He got lost the time before. All the blooming buildings looked alike. He nodded.
“Go down to the third floor and ask Mrs. Schmitt to lend me the shirt pattern she uses for Jake.”
Why couldn’t she just let him sit? She didn’t need the shirt pattern. “All right,” he said. “What number is it?”
“Number 10—just like this. Right below us three floors down.”
Old Dudley was always afraid that when he went out in the dog runs, a door would suddenly open and one of the snipe-nosed men that hung off the window ledges in his undershirt would growl, “What are you doing here?” The door to the nigger’s apartment was open and he could see a woman sitting in a chair by the window. “Yankee niggers,” he muttered. She had on rimless glasses and there was a book in her lap. Niggers don’t think they’re dressed up till they got on glasses, Old Dudley thought. He remembered Lutish’s glasses. She had saved up thirteen dollars to buy them. Then she went to the doctor and asked him to look at her eyes and tell her how thick to get the glasses. He made her look at animals’ pictures through a mirror and he stuck a light through her eyes and looked in her head. Then he said she didn’t need any glasses. She was so mad she burned the corn bread three days in a row, but she bought her some glasses anyway at the tencent store. They didn’t cost her but $1.98 and she wore them every Saddey. “That was niggers,” Old Dudley chuckled. He realized he had made a noise, and covered his mouth with his hand. Somebody might hear him in one of the apartments.
He turned down the first flight of stairs. Down the second he heard footsteps coming up. He looked over the banisters and saw it was a woman—a fat woman with an apron on. From the top, she looked kind er like Mrs. Benson at home. He wondered if she would speak to him. When they were four steps from each other, he darted a glance at her but she wasn’t looking at him. When there were no steps between them, his eyes fluttered up for an instant and she was looking at him cold in the face. Then she was past him. She hadn’t said a word. He felt heavy in his stomach.
He went down four flights instead of three. Then he went back up one and found number 10. Mrs. Schmitt said O.K., wait a minute and she’d get the pattern. She sent one of the children back to the door with it. The child didn’t say anything.
Old Dudley started back up the stairs. He had to take it more slowly. It tired him going up. Everything tired him, looked like. Not like having Rabie to do his running for him. Rabie was a light-footed nigger. He could sneak in a hen house ‘thout even the hens knowing it and get him the fattest fryer in there and not a squawk. Fast too. Dudley had always been slow on his feet. It went that way with fat people. He remembered one time him and Rabie was hunting quail over near Molton. They had ‘em a hound dog that could find a covey quick ern any fancy pointer going. He wasn’t no good at bringing them back but he could find them every time and then set like a dead stump while you aimed at the birds. This one time the hound stopped cold-still. “Dat gonna be a big ‘un,” Rabie whispered, “I feels it.” Old Dudley raised the gun slowly as they walked along. He had to be careful of the pine needles. They covered the ground and made it slick. Rabie shifted his weight from side to side, lifting and setting his feet on the waxen needles with unconscious care. He looked straight ahead and moved forward swiftly. Old Dudley kept one eye ahead and one on the ground. It would slope and he would be sliding forward dangerously, or in pulling himself up an incline, he would slide back down.
“Ain’t I better get dem birds dis time, boss?” Rabie suggested. “You ain’t never easy on yo’ feets on Monday. If you falls in one dem slopes, you gonna scatter dem birds fo’ you gits dat gun up.”
Old Dudley wanted to get the covey. He could er knocked four out of it easy. “I’ll get ‘em,” he muttered. He lifted the gun to his eye and leaned forward. Something slipped beneath him and he slid backward on his heels. The gun went off and the covey sprayed into the air.
“Dem was some mighty fine birds we let get away from us,” Rabie sighed.
“We’ll find another covey,” Old Dudley said. “Now get me out of this damn hole.”
He could er got five er those birds if he hadn’t fallen. He could er shot ‘em off like cans on a fence. He drew one hand back to his ear and extended the other forward. He could er knocked ‘em out like clay pigeons. Bang! A squeak on the staircase made him wheel around—his arms still holding the invisible gun. The nigger was clipping up the steps toward him, an amused smile stretching his trimmed mustache. Old Dudley’s mouth dropped open. The nigger’s lips were pulled down like he was trying to keep from laughing. Old Dudley couldn’t move. He stared at the clear-cut line the nigger’s collar made against his skin.
“What are you hunting, old-timer?” the Negro asked in a voice that sounded like a nigger’s laugh and a white man’s sneer.
Old Dudley felt like a child with a pop-pistol. His mouth was open and his tongue was rigid in the middle of it. Right below his knees felt hollow. His feet slipped and he slid three steps and landed sitting down.
“You better be careful,” the Negro said. “You could easily hurt yourself on these steps.” And he held out his hand for Old Dudley to pull up on. It was a long narrow hand and the tips of the fingernails were clean and cut squarely. They looked like they might have been filed. Old Dudley’s hands hung between his knees. The nigger took him by the arm and pulled up. “Whew!” he gasped, “you’re heavy. Give a little help here.” Old Dudley’s knees unbended and he staggered up. The nigger had him by the arm. “I’m going up anyway,” he said. “I’ll help you.” Old Dudley looked frantically around. The steps behind him seemed to close up. He was walking with the nigger up the stairs. The nigger was waiting for him on each step. “So you hunt?” the nigger was saying. “Well, let’s see. I went deer hunting once. I believe we used a Dodson.38 to get those deer. What do you use?”
Old Dudley was staring through the shiny tan shoes. “I use a gun,” he mumbled.
“I like to fool with guns better than hunting,” the nigger was saying. “Never was much at killing anything. Seems kind of a shame to deplete the game reserve. I’d collect guns if I had the time and the money, though.” He was waiting on every step till Old Dudley got on it. He was explaining guns and makes. He had on gray socks with a black fleck in them. They finished the stairs. The nigger walked down the hall with him, holding him by the arm. It probably looked like he had his arm locked in the nigger’s.
They went right up to Old Dudley’s door. Then the nigger asked, “You from around here?”
Old Dudley shook his head, looking at the door. He hadn’t looked at the nigger yet. All the way up the stairs, he hadn’t looked at the nigger. “Well,” the nigger said, “it’s a swell placeonce you get used to it.” He patted Old Dudley on the back and went into his own apartment. Old Dudley went into his. The pain in his throat was all over his face now, leaking out his eyes.
He shuffled to the chair by the window and sank down in it. His throat was going to pop. His throat was going to pop on account of a nigger—a damn nigger that patted him on the back and called him “old-timer.” Him that knew such as that couldn’t be. Him that had come from a good place. A good place. A place where such as that couldn’t be. His eyes felt strange in their sockets. They were swelling in them and in a minute there wouldn’t be any room left for them there. He was trapped in this place where niggers could call you “old-timer.” He wouldn’t be trapped. He wouldn’t be. He rolled his head on the back of the chair to stretch his neck that was too full.
A man was looking at him. A man was in the window across the alley looking straight at him. The man was watching him cry. That was where the geranium was supposed to be and it was a man in his undershirt, watching him cry, waiting to watch his throat pop. Old Dudley looked back at the man. It was supposed to be the geranium. The geranium belonged there, not the man. “Where is the geranium?” he called out of his tight throat.
“What you cryin’ for?” the man asked. “I ain’t never seen a man cry like that.”
“Where is the geranium?” Old Dudley quavered. “It ought to be there. Not you.”
“This is my window,” the man said. “I got a right to set here if I want to.”
“Where is it?” Old Dudley shrilled. There was just a little room left in his throat.
“It fell off if it’s any of your business,” the man said.
Old Dudley got up and peered over the window ledge. Down in the alley, way six floors down, he could see a cracked flower pot scattered over a spray of dirt and something pink sticking out of a green paper bow. It was down six floors. Smashed down six floors.
Old Dudley looked at the man who was chewing gum and waiting to see the throat pop. “You shouldn’t have put it so near the ledge,” he murmured. “Why don’t you pick it up?”
“Why don’t you, pop?”
Old Dudley stared at the man who was where the geranium should have been.
He would. He’d go down and pick it up. He’d put it in his own window and look at it all day if he wanted to. He turned from the window and left the room. He walked slowly down the dog run and got to the steps. The steps dropped down like a deep wound in the floor. They opened up through a gap like a cavern and went down and down. And he had gone up them a little behind the nigger. And the nigger had pulled him up on his feet and kept his arm in his and gone up the steps with him and said he hunted deer, “old-timer,” and seen him holding a gun that wasn’t there and sitting on the steps like a child. He had shiny tan shoes and he was trying not to laugh and the whole business was laughing. There’d probably be niggers with black flecks in their socks on every step, pulling down their mouths so as not to laugh. The steps dropped down and down. He wouldn’t go down and have niggers pattin’ him on the back. He went back to the room and the window and looked down at the geranium.
The man was sitting over where it should have been. “I ain’t seen you pickin’ it up,” he said.
Old Dudley stared at the man.
“I seen you before.” the man said. “I seen you settin’ in that old chair every day, starin’ out the window, looking in my apartment.
What I do in my apartment is my business, see? I don’t like people looking at what I do.”
It was at the bottom of the alley with its roots in the air.
“I only tell people once,” the man said and left the window.
The Barber (1947)
IT IS trying on liberals in Dilton.
After the Democratic White Primary, Rayber changed his barber. Three weeks before it, while he was shaving him, the barber asked, “Who you gonna vote for?”
“Darmon,” Rayber said.
“You a nigger-lover?”
Rayber started in the chair. He had not expected to be approached so brutally. “No,” he said. If he had nut been taken off-balance, he would have said, “I am neither a Negro—nor a white—lover.” He had said that before to Jacobs, the philosophy man, and—to show you how trying it is for liberals in Dilton—Jacobs—a man of his education—had muttered, “That’s a poor way to be.”
“Why?” Rayber had asked bluntly. He knew he could argue Jacobs down.
Jacobs had said, “Skip it.” He had a class. His classes frequently occurred, Rayber noticed, when Rayber was about to get him in an argument.
“I am neither a Negro—nor a white lover,” Rayber would have said to the barber.
The barber drew a clean path through the lather and then pointed the razor at Rayber. “I’m tellin’ you,” he said, “there ain’t but two sides now, white and black. Anybody can see that from this campaign. You know what Hawk said? Said a hunnert and fifty years ago, they was runnin’ each other down eatin’ each other—throwin’ jewel rocks at birds—skinnin’ horses with their teeth. A nigger come in a white barber shop in Atlanta and says, ‘Gimme a haircut.’ They throwed him out but it just goes to show you. Why listen, three black hyenas over in Mulford last month shot a white man and took half of what was in his house and you know where they are now? Settin’ in their county jail eatin’ like the President of the United States—they might get dirty in the chain gang; or some damn nigger-lover might come by and be heart-broke to see ‘em pickin’ rock. Why, lemme tell you this—ain’t uothin’ gonna be good again until we get rid of them Mother Hubbards and get us a man can put these niggers in their places. Shuh.”
“You hear that, George?” he, shouted to the colored boy wiping up the floor around the basins.
“Sho. do,” George said.
It was time for Rayber to say something but nothing appropriate would come. He wanted to say something that George would understand. He was startled that George had been brought into the conversation. He remembered Jacobs telling about lecturing at a Negro college for a week. They couldn’t say Negro—nigger—colored—black. Jacobs said he had come home every night and shouted, “NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER” out the back window. Rayber wondered what George’s leanings were. He was a trim-looking boy.
“If a nigger come in my shop with any of that haircut sass, he’d get it cut all right.” The barber made a noise between his teeth. “You a Mother Hubbard?” he asked.
“I’m voting for Darmon, if that’s what you mean,” Rayber said.
“You ever heard Hawkson talk?”
“I’ve had that pleasure,” Rayber said.
“You heard his last one?”
“No, I understand his remarks don’t alter from speech to speech,” Rayber said curtly.
“Yeah?” the barber said. “Well, this last speech was a killeroo! Ol’ Hawk let them Mother Hubbards have it.”
“A good many people,” Rayber said, “consider Hawkson a demagogue.” He wondered if George knew what demagogue meant. Should have said, “lying politician.”
“Demagogue!” The. barber slapped his knee and whooped. “That’s what Hawk said!” he howled. “Ain’t that a shot! ‘Folks,’ he says, ‘them Mother ‘Hubbards says I’m a demagogue.’ Then he rears back and says sort of soft-like, ‘Am I a demagogue, you people?’ Alld they yells, ‘Naw, Hawk, you ain’t no demagogue!’ And he comes forward shouting, ‘Oh yeah I am, I’m the best damn demagogue in this state!’ And you should hear them people roar! Whew!”
“Quite a show,” Rayber said, “but what is it but a…”
“Mother Hubbard,” the barber muttered. “You been taken in by ‘em all right. Lemme tell you sornethin’…” He reviewed Hawkson’s Fourth of July speech. It had been another killeroo, ending with poetry. Who was Darmon? Hawk wanted to know. Yeah, who was Darmon? the crowd had roared. Why, didn’t they know? Why, he was Little Boy Blue, blowin’ his horn. Yeah. Babies in the meadow and niggers in the corn. Man! Rayber should have heard that one. No Mother Hubbard could have stood up under it.
Rayber thought that if the barber would read a few….
Listen, he didn’t have to read nothin.’ All he had to do was think. That was the trouble with people these days—they didn’t think, they didn’t use their horse sense. Why wasn’t Rayber thinkin’? Where was his horse sense?
Why am I straining myself? Rayber thought irritably.
“Nossir!” the barber said. “Big words don’t do nobody no good. They don’t take the place of thinkin’.”
“Thinking!” Rayber shouted. “You call yourself thinking?”
“Listen,” the barber said, “do you know what Huwk told them people at Tilford?” At Tilford Hawk had told them that he liked niggers fine’ in their place and if they didn’t stay in that place, he had a place to put ‘em. How about that?
Rayber wanted to know what that had to do with thinking.
The barber thought it was plain as a pig on a sofa what that had to do with thinking. He thought a good many other things too. which he told Rayber. He said Rayber should have heard the Hawkson speeches at Mullin’s Oak, Bedford, and Chickerville.
Rayber settled down in his chair again and reminded the barber that he had come in for a shave.
The barber started back shaving him. He said Rayber should have heard the one at Spartasville. “There wasn’t a Mother Hubbard left standin’, and all the Boy Blues got their horns broke. Hawk said,” he said, “that the time had come when you had to sit on the lid with…”
“I have an appointment,” Rayber said. “I’m a hurry.” Why should he stay and listen to that tripe?
As much rot as it was, the whole asinine conversation stuck with him the rest of the day and went through his mind in persistent detail after he was in bed that night. To his disgust, he found that he was going through it, putting in what he would have said if he’d had an opportunity to prepare himself. He wondered how Jacobs would have handled it. Jacobs had a way about him that made people think he knew more than Rayber thought he knew. It was not a bad trick in his profession. Rayber often amused himself analyzing it. Jacobs would have handled the barber calmly enough. Rayber started through the conversation again, thinking how Jacobs would have done it. He ended doing it himself.
The next time he went to the barber’s, he had forgotten about the argument. The barber seemed to have forgotten it too. He disposed of the weather and stopped talking. Rayber was wondering what was going to be for supper. Oh. It was Tuesday. On Tuesday his wife had canned meat. Took canned meat and baked it with cheese—slice of meat and a slice of cheese—turned out striped—why do we have to have this stuff every Tuesday?—if you don’t like it you don’t have to—
“You still a Mother Hubbard?”
Rayber’s head jerked. “What?”
“You still for Darmon?”
“Yes,” Rayber said and his brain darted to its store of preparations.
“Well, look-a-here, you teachers, you know, looks like, well…”
He was confused. Rayber could see that he was not so sure of himself as he’d been the last time. He probably thought he had a new point to stress. “Looks like you fellows would vote for Hawk on account of you know what he said about teachers’ salaries. Seems like you would now. Why not? Don’t you want more money?”
“More money!” Rayber laughed. “Don’t you know that with a rotten governor I’d lose more money than he’d give me?” He realized that he was finally on the barber’s level. “Why, he dislikes too many different kinds of people,” he said. “He’d cost me twice as much as Darmon.”
“So what if he would?” the barber said. “I ain’t one to pinch money when it does some good. I’ll pay for quality any day.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Rayber began. “That’s not…”
“That raise Hawk’s promised don’t apply to teachers like him anyway,” somebody said from the back of the room. A fat man with an air of executive assurance came over near Rayber. “He’s a college teacher, ain’t he?”
“Yeah,” the barber said, “that’s right. He wouldn’t get Hawk’s raise; but say, he wouldn’t get one if Darmon was elected neither.”
“Ahh, he’d get something. All the schools are supporting Darmon. They stand to get their cut-free textbooks or new desks or something. That’s the rules of the game.”
“Better schools,” Rayber sputtered, “benefit everybody.”
“Seems like I been hearin’ that a long time,” the barber said.
“You see,” the man explained, “you can’t put nothing over on the schools. That’s the way they throw it off—benefits everybody.”
The barber laughed.
“If you ever thought…” Rayber began.
“Maybe there’d be a new desk at the head of the room for you,” the man chortled. “How about that, Joe?” He nudged the barber.
Rayber wanted to lift his foot under the man’s chin. “You ever heard about reasoning?” he muttered.
“Listen,” the man said, “you can talk all you want. What you don’t realize is, we’ve got an issue here. How’d you like a couple of black faces looking at you from the back of your classroom?”
Rayber had a blind moment when he felt as if something that wasn’t there was bashing him to the ground. George came in and began washing basins. “Willing to teach any person willing to learn—black or white,” Rayber said. He wondered if George had looked up.
“All right,” the barber agreed, “but not mixed up together, huh’ How’d you like to go to a white school, George?” he shouted.
“Wouldn’t like that,” George said. “We needs sommo powders. These here the las’ in this box.” He dusted them out into the basin.
“Go get some then,” the barber said.
“The time has come,” the executive went on, “just like Hawkson said, when we got to sit on the lid with both feet and a mule.” He went on to review Hawkson’s Fourth of July speech.
Rayber would like to have pushed him into the basin. The day was hot and full enough of flies without having to spend it listening to a fat fool. He could see the courthouse sq narc, blue-green cool, through the tinted glass window. He wished to hell the barber would hurry. He fixed his attention on the square outside, feeling himself there where, he could tell from the trees, the air was moving slightly. A group of men sauntered up the courthouse walk. Rayber looked more closely and thought he recognized Jacobs. But Jacobs had a late afternoon class. It was Jacobs, though. Or was it. If it were, who was he talking to? Blakeley’ Or was that Blakeley. He squinted. Three colored boys in zoot suits strolled by on the sidewalk. One dropped down on the pavement so that only his head was visible to Rayber, and the other two lounged over him, leaning against the barbershop window and making a hole in the view. Why the hell can’t they park somewhere else? Rayber thought fiercely. “Hurry up,” he said to the barber, “I have an appointment.”
“What’s your hurry?” the fat man said. “You better stay and stick up for Boy Blue.”
”You know you never told us why you’re gonna vote for him,” the barber chuckled, taking the cloth from around Rayber’s neck.
“Yeah,” the fat man said, “see can you tell us without sayin’, goodgovermint.”
“I have an appointment,” Rayber said. “I can’t stay.”
“You just know Darmon is so sorry you won’t he able to say a good word for him,” the fat man howled.
“Listen,” Rayber said, “I’ll be back in here next week and I’ll give you as many reasons for voting for Darmon as you want better reasons than you’ve given me fur voting for Hawkson.”
“I’d like to see you do that,” the barber said. “Because I’m telling you, it can’t be done.”
“All right, we’ll see,” Rayber said.
“Remember,” the fat man carped, “vou ain’t gonna say, goodgovermint.”
“I won’t say anything you can’t understand,” Rayber muttered and then felt foolish for showing his irritation. The fat man and the barber were grinning. “I’ll see you Tuesday,” Rayber said and left. He was disgusted with himself for saying he would give them reasons. Reasons would have to be worked out—systematically. He couldn’t open his head in a second like they did. He wished to hell he could. He wished to hell “Mother Hubbard” weren’t so accurate. He wished to hell Darmon spit tobacco juice. The reasons would have to be worked out—time and trouble. What was the matter with him? Why not work them out? He could make everything in that shop squirm if he put his mind to it.
By the time he got home, he had the beginnings of an outline for an argument. It would be filled in with no waste words, no big words—no easy job, he could see.
He got right to work on it. He worked on it until suppertime and had four sentences—all crossed out. He got up once in the middle of the meal to go to his desk and change one. After supper he crossed the correction out.
“What is the matter with you?” his wife wanted to know.
“Not a thing,” Rayber said, “not a thing. I just have to work.”
“I’m not stopping you,” she said.
When she went out, he kicked the board loose on the bottom of the desk. By eleven o’clock he had one page. The next morning it came easier, and he finished it by noon. He thought it was blunt enough. It began, “For two reasons, men elect other men to power,” and it ended, “Men who use ideas without measuring them are walking on wind.” He thought the last sentence was pretty effective. He thought the whole thing was effective enough.
In the afternoon he took it around to Jacob’s office. Blakeley was there but he left. Rayber read the paper to Jacobs.
“Well,” Jacobs said, “so what? What do you call yourself doing?” He had been jotting figures down on a record sheet all the time Rayber was reading.
Rayber wondered if he were busy. “Defending myself against barbers,” he said. “You ever tried to argue with a barber?”
“I never argue,” Jacobs said.
“That’s because you don’t know this kind of ignorance,” Rayber explained. “You’ve never experienced it.”
Jacobs snorted. “Oh yes I have,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I never argue.”
“But you know you’re right,” Rayber persisted.
“I never argue.”
“Well, I’m going to argue,” Rayber said. “I’m going to say the right thing as fast as they can say the wrong. It’ll be a question of speed. Understand,” he went on, “this is no mission of conversion; I’m defending myself.”
“I understand that,” Jacobs said. “I hope you’re able to do it.”
“I’ve already done it! You read the paper. There it is.” Rayber wondered if Jacobs were dense or preoccupied.
“Okay, then, leave it there. Don’t spoil your complexion arguing with barbers.”
“It’s got to be done,” Rayber said.
Jacobs shrugged.
Rayber had counted on discussing it with him at length. “Well, I’ll see you,” he said.
“Okay,” Jacobs said.
Rayber wondered why he had ever read the paper to him in the first place.
Before he left for the barber’s Tuesday afternoon, Rayber was nervous and he thought that by way of practice he’d try the paper out on his wife. He didn’t know but what she was for Hawkson herself. Whenever he mentioned the election, she made it a point to say, “Just because you teach doesn’t mean you know everything.” Did he ever say he knew anything at all? Maybe he wouldn’t call her. But he wanted to hear how the thing was actually going to sound said casually. It wasn’t long; wouldn’t take up much of her time. She would probably dislike being called. Still, she might possibly be affected by what he said. Possibly. He called her.
She said all right, but he’d just have to wait until she got through what she was doing; it looked like every time she got her hands in something, she had to leave and go do something else.
He said he didn’t have all day to wait—it was only forty-five minutes until the shop closed—and would she please hurry up?
She came in wiping her hands and said all right; all right, she was there, wasn’t she? Go ahead.
He began saying it very easily and casually, looking over her head. The sound of his voice playing over the words was not bad. He wondered it it were the words themselves or his tones that made them sound the way they did. He paused in the middle of a sentence and glanced at his wife to see if her face would give him any clue. Her head was turned slightly toward the table by her chair where an ‘open magazine was lying. As he paused, she got up. “That was very nice,” she said and went back to the kitchen. Rayber left for the barber’s.
He walked slowly, thinking what he was going to say in the shop and now and then stopping to look absently at a store window. Block’s Feed Company had a display of automatic chicken-killers—“So Timid Persons Can Kill Their Own Fowl” the sign over them read. Rayber wondered if many timid persons used them. As he neared the barber’s, he could see obliquely through the door the man with the executive assurance was sitting in the corner reading a newspaper. Rayber went in and hung up his hat.
“Howdy,” the barber said.” Ain’t this the hottest day in the year, though!”
“It’s hot enough,” Rayber said.
“Hunting season soon be over,” the barber commented.
All right, Rayber wanted to say, let’s get this thing going. He thought he would work into his argument from their remarks. The fat man hadn’t noticed him.
“You should have seen the covey this dog of mine flushed the other day,” the barber went on as Rayber got in the chair. “The birds spread once and we got four and they spread again and we got two. That ain’t bad.”
“Never hunted quail,” Rayber said hoarsely.
“There ain’t nothing like taking a nigger and a hound dog and a gun and going after quail,” the barber said. “You missed a lot out of life if you ain’t had that.”
Rayber cleared his throat and the barber went on working. The fat man in the corner turned a page. What do they think I came in here for? Rayber thought. They couldn’t have forgotten. He waited, hearing the noises flies make and the mumble of the men talking in the back. The fat man turned another page. Rayber could hear George’s broom slowly stroking the floor somewhere in the shop, then stop, then scrape, then “You er, still a Hawkson man?”
Rayber asked the barber.
“Yeah!” the barber laughed. “Yeah! You know I had forgot. You was gonna tell us why you are voting for Darrnon. Hey, Roy!” he yelled to the fat man, “come over here. We gonna hear why we should vote for Boy Blue.”
Roy grunted and turned another page. “Be there when I finish this piece,” he mumbled.
“What you got there, Joe?” one of the men in the back called, “one of them goodgovermint boys?”
“Yeah,” the barber said. “He’s gonna make a speech.”
“I’ve heard too many of that kind already,” the man said.
“You ain’t heard one by Rayber,” the barber said. “Rayber’s all right. He don’t know how to vote, but he’s all right.”
Rayber reddened. Two of the men strolled up. “This is no speech,” Rayber said. “I only want to discuss it with you—sanely.”
“Come on over here, Roy,” the barber yelled.
“What are you trying to make of this?” Rayber muttered; then he said suddenly, “If you’re calling everybody else, why don’t you call your boy, George. You afraid to have him listen?”
The barber looked at Rayber for a second without saying anything. Rayber felt as if he had made himself too much at home.
“He can hear,” the barber said. “He can hear back where he is.”
“I just thought he might be interested,” Rayber said.
“He can hear,” the barber repeated. “He can hear what he hears and he can hear two times that much. He can hear what you don’t say as well as what you do.”
Roy came over folding his newspaper. “Howdy, boy,” he said, putting his hand on Rayber’s head, “let’s get on with this speech.”
Rayber felt as if he were fighting his way out of a net. They were over him with their red faces grinning. He heard the words drag out—“Well, the way I see it, men elect…” He felt them pull out of his mouth like freight cars, jangling, backing up on each other, grating to a halt, sliding, clinching back, jarring, and then suddenly stopping as roughly as they had begun. It was over. Rayber was jarred that it was over so soon. For a second—as if they were expecting him to go on—no one said anything.
Then, “How many yawl gonna vote for Boy Blue!” the barber yelled.
Some of the men turned around and snickered. One doubled over.
“Me,” Roy said. “I’m gonna run right down there now so I’ll be first to vote for Boy Blue tomorrow morning.”
“Listen!” Rayber shouted, “I’m not trying…”
“George,” the barber yelled, “you heard that speech?”
“Yessir,” George said.
“Who you gonna vote for, George?”
“I’m not trying to…” Rayber yelled.
“I don’t know is they gonna let me vote,” George said. “Do, I gonna vote for Mr. Hawkson.”
“Listen!” Rayber yelled, “do you think I’m trying to change your fat minds? What do you think I am?” He jerked the barber around by the shoulder. “Do you think I’d tamper with your damn fool ignorance?”
The barber shook Rayber’s grip off his shoulder. “Don’t get excited,” he said, “we all thought it was a fine speech. That’s what I been saying all along—you got to think, you got to…” He lurched backward when Rayber hit him, and landed sitting on the footrest of the next chair. “Thought it was fine,” he finished, looking steadily at Rayber’s white, half-lathered face glaring down at him. “It’s what I been saying all along.”
The blood began pounding up Raybers neck just! under his skin. He turned and pushed quickly through the men around him to the door. Outside, the sun was suspending everything in a pool of heat, and before he had turned the first corner, almost running, lather began to drip inside his collar and down the barber’s bib, dangling to his knees.
Wildcat (1947)
OLD GABRIEL shuffled across the room waving his stick slowly sideways in front of him.
“Who that?” he whispered, appearing in the doorway. “I smells fo’ niggers.”
Their soft, minor-toned laughter rose above the frog’s hum and blended into voices.
“Cain’t you do no bettern that, Gabe?”
“Is you gain’ with us, Granpaw?”
“You oughter be able to smell good enough to git our names.”
Old Gabriel moved out on the porch a little way. “That Matthew an’ George an’ Willie Myrick. An’ who that other?”
“This Boon Williams, Granpaw.”
Gabriel felt for the edge of the porch with his stick. “What yawl doin’? Set down a spell.”
“We waitin’ on Mose an’ Luke.”
“We gain’ huntin’ that cat.”
“What yawl huntin’ him with?” old Gabriel muttered. “Yawl ain’t got nothin’ fit to kill a wildcat with.” He sat down on the edge of the porch and hung his feet over the side. “I done tal’ Mose an’ Luke that.”
“How many wildcats you killed, Gabrul?” Their voices, rising to him through the darkness, were full of gentle mockery.
“When I was a boy, there was a cat once,” Gabriel started. “It come ‘round here huntin’ blood. Come in through the winder of a cabin one night an’ sprung in bed with a nigger an’ tore that nigger’s throat open befo’ he could holler good.”
“This cat in the woods, Granpaw. It jus’ come out to git cows.
Jupe Williams seen it when he gone through to the sawmill.”
“What he done about it?”
“Started runnin’.” Their laughter broke over the night sounds again. “He thought it was after him.”
“It was,” old Gabriel murmured.
“It after cows.”
Gabriel sniffed. “It comin’ out the woods for mo’ than cows. It gonna git itssef some folks’ blood. You watch. An’ yawl gain’ off huntin’ it ain’t gonna do no good. It guin’ huntiu’ itssef. I been smellin’ it.”
“How you know that it you smellin’?”
“Ain’t no mistakin’ a wildcat. Ain’t heen one ‘round here since I was a boy. Why don’t yawl set a spell” he added.
“You ain’t afraid to stay here by yoself, is you paw?”
Old Gabriel stiffened. He felt for the post to pull himself up on. “Ef you waitin’ on Mose an’ Luke,” he said, “you better git goin’. They started over to yawl’s place an hour ago.”
II
“Come in here, I say! Come in here right now!”
The blind boy sat alone on the steps, staring ahetd. “All the men gone?” he called.
“All gone but Ol’ Hezuh. Come in.”
He hated to go in—among the women.
“I smells it,” he said.
“You come in here, Gabriel.”
He went in and walked to where the window was. The women were muttering at him.
“You stay in here, boy.”
“You be ‘tractin’ that cat right in this room, setlin’ out there.”
No air was coming through the window, and he scratched at the shutter latch to open it.
“Don’t open that winder, boy. Us don’t want no wildcat jumpin’ in here.”
“I could er gone wit ‘em,” he said sullenly. “I could er smelled it out. I ain’t afraid.” Shut up wit these women like he one too.
“Reba say she kin smell it herself.”
He heard the old woman groan in the corner. “They ain’t gonna do no good out huntin’ it,” she whined. “It here. It right around here. Ef it jump in this room it gonna git me fust, then it gonna git that boy, then it gonna git…”
“Hush yo’ mouth, Reba,” he heard his mother say. “I look after my boy.”
He could look after hissef. He warn’t afraid. He could smell it—him an’ Reba could. It’d jump on them fust; fust Reba an’ then him. It was the shape of a reg’lar cat only bigger, his mother said. An’ where you felt the sharp points on a house eat’s foot, you felt big knife claws in a wildcat’s, an’ knife teeth, too; an’ it breathed heat an’ spit wet lime. Gabriel could feel its claws in his shoulders and its teeth in his throat. But he wouldn’t let ‘em stay there. He’d lock his arms ‘round its body an’ feel up for its neck an’ jerk its head back an’ go down wit it on the floor until its claws dropped away from his shoulders. Beat, beat, beat its head, beat, beat beat….
“Who wit Ol’ Hezuh?” one of the women asked.
“Jus’ Nancy.”
“Oughter be somebody else down there,” his mother said softly.
Reba moaned. “Anybody go out gonna git sprung on befo’ they gits there. It around here, I say. It gittin’ closer an’ closer. It gonna git me sho.”
He could smell it strong.
“How it gonna git in here? Yawl jus’ frettin’ for nothin’.”
That was Thin Minnie. Nothin’ could git her. She’d had a spell on her since when she was small—put there by a conjer woman.
“It come in easy ef it wanter,” Reba snorted. “It tear up that cat hole an’ come through.”
“We could be down to Nancy’s by then,” Minnie snitfed.
“Yawl could,” the old woman muttered.
Him an’ her couldn’t, he knew. But he’d stay an’ fight it. You see that blin’ boy there? He the one kill the wildcat!
Reba started groaning.
“Hush that!” his mother ordered.
The groaning turned into singing—low in her throat.
“Lord, Lord,
Gonna see yo’ pilgrim today.
Lord, Lord, Gonna see yo’..”
“Hush!” his mother hissed. “What that I hear?”
Gabriel leaned forward in the silence; stiff, ready.
It was a thump, thump and maybe a snarl, away, muffled, and then a shriek, far away, then louder and louder, closer and closer, over the edge of the hill into the yard and up on the porch. The cabin was shaking with the weight of a body against the door. There was the feel of a rush inside the room and the scream was let in. Nancy!
“It got him!” she screamed. “Got him, sprung in through the winder, got him in the throat. Hezuh,” she wailed, “Ol’ Hezuh.”
Later in the night the men returned, carrying a rabbit and two squirrels.
III
Old Gabriel crept back through the darkness to his bed. He could sit in the chair a while or he could lie down. He eased down in the bed and pushed his nose into the feel and smell of the quilt. They won’t no use to do that. He could smell the other jus’ the same. He had been smellin’ it, been srnellin’ it ever since they started talkin’ about it. There it was one evenin’—different from all the smells around, different from niggers’ and cows’ an’ ground smells. Wildcat. Tull Williams seen it jump on a bull.
Gabriel sat up suddenly. It was nearer. He got out the bed and pushed to the door. He had bolted that one; the other must be open. A breeze was coming in and he walked in it until he felt the night air full in his face. This one was open. He slammed it shut and pushed the bolt in. What was the use to do that? Ef the cat aimed on comin’ in, it could git there. He went back to the chair and sat down. It come in east ef it wanta. There were little drafts all around him. By the door there was a hole the hound could git under; that cat could gnaw it through an’ be in befo’ he got out. Maybe ef he sat by the back do’, he could git away quicker. He got up and dragged his chair after him across the room. The smell was near. Maybe he’d count. He could count to a thousand. Won’t no nigger for five miles could count that fur. He started counting.
Mose an’ Luke wouldn’t be back for six hours yet. Tomorrow night they wouldn’t go; but the cat was gonna git him tonight. Lemme go wit you boys an’ smell him out for you. I the onliest one kin smell ‘round here.
They’d lose him in the woods, they’d said. Huntin’ wildcats won’t no business for him.
I ain’t afraid er no wildcat er no woods neither. Lemme go wit you boys, lemme go.
Ain’t no reason to be ‘fraid to stay here by yosef, they’d laughed. Ain’t nothin’ gonna git you. We take you up the road to Mattie’s ef you scaird.
Mattie’s! Take him to Mattie’s! Settiri’ wit the women. What yawl think I is? I ain’t afraid er no wildcat. But it comin’, boys; an’ it ain’t gonna be in no woods—it gonna be here. Yawl wastin’ yo’ time in the woods. Stay here an’ you ketch it.
He suppose to be countin’. Where he Ieft off at? Five hunnert an’ five, five hunnert an’ six… Mattie’s! What they think he is? Five hunnert an’ two, five hunnert an’….
He sat stiff in the chair with his hands gripped tight to the stick across his knees. It won’t gonna git him like he was a woman. His shirt was stuck wet to him, making him smell higher. The men had come back later in the night with a rabbit and two squirrels. He began to remember the other wildcat and he remembered as if he had been in Hezuh’s cabin instead of with the women. He wondered was he Hezuh. He was Gabrul. It won’t gonna git him like Hezuh. He was gonna hit it. He was gonna pull it off. He was gonna… how he gonna do all that? He hadn’t been able to wring a chicken’s neck for fo’ years. It was gonna git him. Won’t nothin’ to do but wait. The smell was near. Won’t nothin’ for old people to do but wait. It was gonna git him tonight. The teeth would be hot an’ the claws cold. The claws would sink in soft, an’ the teeth would cut sharp an’ scrape his bones inside.
Gabriel felt the sweat on himself. It kin smell me good’s I kin smell it, he thought. I settin’ here smellin’ an’ it cornin’ here smellin’. Two hunnert an’ fa’, where he lef’ off at? Fa’ hunnert an’ five….
There was a sudden scratching by the chimney. He sat forward, tense, tight-throated. “Come on,” he whispered, “I here. I waitin’.” He couldn’t move. He couldn’t make himself move. There was another scratching. It was the pain he didn’t want. But he didn’t want the waiting either. “I here,” he—there was another, just a small noise and then a flutter. Bats. His grip on the stick loosened. He should have known that won’t it. It won’t no farther than the barn yet. What ail his nose? What ail him? Won’t no nigger for hunnert miles could smell like he could. He heard the scratching again, coming differently, coming from the corner of the house where the cat hole was. Pick pick… pick. That was a bat. He knowd that was a bat. Pick pick. “Here I is,” he whispered. Won’t no bat. He braced his feet to get up. Pick. “Lord waitin’ on me,” he whispered. “He don’t want me with my face tore open. Why don’t you go on, Wildcat, why you want me?” He was on his feet now. “Lord don’t want me with no wildcat marks.” He was moving toward the cat hole. Across on the river bank the Lord was waiting on him with a troupe of angels and golden vestments for him to put on and when he came, he’d put on the vestments and stand there with the Lord and the angels, judging life. Won’t no nigger for fifty miles fitter to judge than him. Pick. He stopped. He smelled it right outside, nosing the hole. He had to climb onto something! What he going toward it for? He had to get on something high! There was a shelf nailed over the chimney and he turned wildly and fell against a chair and shoved it up to the fireplace. He caught hold of the shelf and pulled himself onto the chair and sprang up and backwards and felt the narrow shelf board under him for an instant and then felt it sag and jerked his feet up and felt it crack somewhere from the wall. His stomach flew inside him and stopped hard and the shelf board fell across his feet and the rung of the chair hit against his head and then, after a second of stillness, he heard a low, gasping animal cry wail over two hills and fade past him; then snarls, tearing short, furious, through the pain wails. Gabriel sat stiff on the floor.
“Cow,” he breathed finally. “Cow.”
Gradually he felt his muscles loosen. It got to her befo’ him. It would go on off now, but it would be back tomorrer night. He rose shaking from the chair and stumbled to his bed. The cat had been a half mile away. He won’t sharp like he used to be. They shouldn’t leave old people by theyselves. He done tole ‘em they won’t gonna ketch nothin’ off in no woods. Tomorrer night it would come back. Tomorrer night they would stay here an’ kill it. Now he want to sleep. He done tole ‘em they couldn’t get no wildcat in no woods. He the one tole ‘em where it gonna be. They’d a listened to him, they’d done had it by now. When he die he want to be sleepin’ in a bed; didn’t want to be on no floor with a wildcat stuck in his face. Lord waitin’.
When he woke up, the darkness was full of morning things. He heard Mose and Luke at the stove and smelled the side meat in the skillet. He reached for his snuff and filled his lip. “What yawl ketch?” he asked trenchantly.
“Ain’t caught nothin’ las’ night.” Luke put the plate in his hands. “Here yo’ side meat. How you bust that shelf?”
“Ain’t busted no shelf,” old Gabriel muttered. “Wind to’ it down and waked me up in the middle of the night. It been due to fall. You ain’t never built nothin’ yet stayed together.”
“We sot a trap,” Mose said. “We git that cat tonight.”
“Yawl sho will, boys,” Gabriel said. “It’ll be right here tonight. Ain’t it done kill a cow a half a mile from here las’ night?”
“That don’t mean it comin’ this way,” Luke said.
“It comin’ this way,” Gabriel said.
“How many wildcats you killed, Granpaw?”
Gabriel stopped; the plate of side meat tremored in his hand.
“I knows what I knows, boy.”
“We git it soon. We sot a trap over in Ford’s Woods. It been around there. We gain’ up in a tree over the trap every night an’ wait ‘til we gits it.”
Their forks were scraping back and forth over their tin plates like knife teeth against stone.
“You wants somemo’ side meat, Granpaw?”
Gabriel put his fork down on the quilt. “No, boy,” he said, “no mo’ side meat.” The darkness was hollow around him and through its depth, animal cries wailed and mingled with the beats pounding in his throat.
The Crop (1946)
MISS WILLERTON always crumbed the table. It was her particular household accomplishment and she did it with great thoroughness. Lucia and Bertha did the dishes and Garner went into the parlor and did the Morning Press crossword puzzle. That left Miss Willerton in the dining room by herself and that was all right with Miss Willerton. Whew! Breakfast in that house was always an ordeal. Lucia insisted that they have a regular hour for breakfast just like they did for other meals. Lucia said a regular breakfast made for other regular habits, and with Garner’s tendency to upsets, it was imperative that they establish some system in their eating. This way she could also see that he put the Agar-Agar on his Cream of Wheat. As if, Miss Willerton thought, after having done it for fifty years, he’d be capable of doing anything else. The breakfast dispute always started with Garner’s Cream of Wheat and ended with her three spoonfuls of pineapple crush. “You know your acid, Willie,” Miss Lucia would always say, “you know your acid”; and then Garner would roll his eyes and make some sickening remark and Bertha would jump and Lucia would look distressed and Miss Willerton would taste the pineapple crush she had already swallowed.
It was a relief to crumb the table. Crumbing the table gave one time to think, and if Miss Willerton were going to write a story, she had to think about it first. She could usually think best sitting in front of her typewriter, but this would do for the time being. First, she had to think of a subject to write a story about. There were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one. That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about than she did writing. Sometimes she discarded subject after subject and it usually took her a week or two to decide finally on something. Miss Willerton got out the silver crumber and the crumb-catcher and started stroking the table. I wonder, she mused, if a baker would make a good subject? Foreign bakers were very picturesque, she thought. Aunt Myrtile Filmer had left her four color-tints of French bakers in mushroom-looking hats. They were great tall fellows—blond and….
“Willie!” Miss Lucia screamed, entering the dining room with the saltcellars. “For heaven’s sake, hold the catcher under the crumber or you’ll have those crumbs on the rug. I’ve Bisseled it four times in the last week and I am not going to do it again.”
“You have not Bisseled it on account of any crumbs I have spilled,” Miss Willerton said tersely. “I always pick up the crumbs I drop,” and she added, “I drop relatively few.”
“And wash the crumber before you put it up this time,” Miss Lucia returned.
Miss Willerton drained the crumbs into her hand and threw them out the window. She took the catcher and crumber to the kitchen and ran them under the cold-water faucet. She dried them and stuck them back in the drawer. That was over. Now she could get to the typewriter. She could stay there until dinnertime.
Miss Willerton sat down at her typewriter and let out her breath. Now! What had she been thinking about? Oh. Bakers. Hmmm. Bakers. No, bakers wouldn’t do. Hardly colorful enough. No social tension connected with bakers. Miss Willerton sat staring through her typewriter. A S D F G—her eyes wandered over the keys. Hmmm. Teachers? Miss Willerton wondered. No. Heavens no. Teachers always made Miss Willerton feel peculiar. Her teachers at Willowpool Seminary had been all right but they were women. Willowpool Female Seminary, Miss Willerton remembered. She didn’t like the phrase, Willowpool Female Seminary—it sounded biological. She always just said she was a graduate of Willowpool. Men teachers made Miss Willerton feel as if she were going to mispronounce something. Teachers weren’t timely anyhow. They weren’t even a social problem.
Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm. Sharecroppers! Miss Willerton had never been intimately connected with sharecroppers but, she reflected, they would make as arty a subject as any, and they would give her that air of social concern which was so valuable to have in the circles she was hoping to travel! “I can always capitalize,” she muttered, “on the hookworm.” It was coming to her now! Certainly! Her fingers plinked excitedly over the keys, never touching them. Then suddenly she began typing at great speed.
“Lot Motun,” the typewriter registered, “called his dog.” “Dog” was followed by an abrupt pause. Miss Willerton always did her best work on the first sentence. “First sentences,” she always said, “came to her—like a flash! Just like a flash!” she would say and snap her fingers, “like a flash!” And she built her story up from them. “Lot Motun called his dog” had been automatic with Miss Willerton, and reading the sentence over, she decided that not only was “Lot Motun” a good name for a sharecropper, but also that having him call his dog was an excellent thing to have a sharecropper do. “The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to Lot.” Miss Willerton had the sentence down before she realized her error—two “Lots” in one paragraph. That was displeasing to the ear. The typewriter grated back and Miss Willerton applied three x’s to “Lot.” Over it she wrote in pencil, “him.” Now she was ready to go again. “Lot Motun called his dog. The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him.” Two dogs, too, Miss Willerton thought. Ummm. But that didn’t affect the ears like two “Lots,” she decided.
Miss Willerton was a great believer in what she called “phonetic art.” She maintained that the ear was as much a reader as the eye. She liked to express it that way. “The eye forms a picture,” she had told a group at the United Daughters of the Colonies, “that can be painted in the abstract, and the success of a literary venture” (Miss Willerton liked the phrase, ‘literary venture’) “depends on the abstract created in the mind and the tonal quality” (Miss Willerton also liked ‘tonal quality’) “registered in the ear.” There was something biting and sharp about “Lot Motun called his dog”; followed by “the dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him,” it gave the paragraph just the send-off it needed.
“He pulled the animal’s short, scraggy ears and rolled over with it in the mud.” Perhaps, Miss Willerton mused, that would be over doing it. But a sharecropper, she knew, might reasonably be expected to roll over in the mud. Once she had read a novel dealing with that kind of people in which they had done just as bad and, throughout three-fourths of the narrative, much worse. Lucia found it in cleaning out one of Miss Willertori’s bureau drawers and after glancing at a few random pages took it between thumb and index finger to the furnace and threw it in. “When I was cleaning your bureau out this morning, Willie, I found a book that Garner must have put there for a joke,” Miss Lucia told her later. “It was awful, but you know how Garner is. I burned it” And then, tittering, she added, “I was sure it couldn’t be yours.” Miss Willerton was sure it could be none other’s than hers but she hesitated in claiming the distinction. She had ordered it from the publisher because she didn’t want to ask for it at the library. It had cost her $3.75 with the postage and she had not finished the last four chapters. At least, she had got enough from it, though, to be able to say that Lot Motun might reasonably roll over in the mud with his dog. Having him do that would give more point to the hookworm, too, she decided. “Lot Motun called his dog. The dog pricked lip its ears and slunk over to him. He pulled the animal’s short. scraggy ears and rolled over with it in the mud.”
Miss Willerton settled back. That was a good beginning. Now she would plan her action. There had to be a woman, of course. Perhaps Lot could kill her. That type of woman always started trouble. She might even goad him on to kill her because of her wantonness and then he would be pursued by his conscience maybe.
He would have to have principles if that were going to be the case, but it would be fairly easy to give him those. Now how was she going to work that in with all the love interest there’d have to be, she wondered. There would have to be some quite violent, naturalistic scenes, the sadistic sort of thing one read of in connection with that class. It was a problem. However, Miss Willerton enjoyed such problems. She liked to plan passionate scenes best of all, but when she came to write them, she always began to feel peculiar and to wonder what the family would say when they read them. Garner would snap his fingers and wink at her at every opportunity; Bertha would think she was terrible; and Lucia would say in that silly voice of hers, “What have you been keeping from us, Willie? What have you been keeping from us,” and titter like she always did. But Miss Willerton couldn’t think about that now; she had to plan her characters.
Lot would be tall, stooped, and shaggy but with sad eyes that made him look like a gentleman in spite of his red neck and big fumbling hands. He’d have straight teeth and, to indicate that he had some spirit, red hair. His clothes would hang on him but he’d wear them nonchalantly like they were part of his skin; maybe, she mused, he’d better not roll over with the dog after all. The woman would be more or less pretty-yellow hair, fat ankles, muddy-colored eyes.
She would get supper for him in the cabin and he’d sit there eating the lumpy grits she hadn’t bothered to put salt in and thinking about something big, something way off—another cow, a painted house, a clean well, a farm of his own even. The woman would yowl at him for not cutting enough wood for her stove and would whine about the pain in her back. She’d sit and stare at him eating the sour grits and say he didn’t have nerve enough to steal food. “You’re just a damn beggar!” she’d sneer. Then he’d tell her to keep quiet. “Shut your mouth!” he’d shout. “I’ve taken all I’m gonna.” She’d roll her eyes, mocking him, and laugh—“I ain’t afraid er nothin’ that looks like you.” Then he’d push his chair behind him and head toward her. She’d snatch a knife off the table—Miss Willerton wondered what kind of a fool the woman was—and back away holding it in front of her. He’d lunge forward but she’d dart from him like a wild horse. Then they’d face each other again—their eyes brimming with hate—and sway back and forth. Miss Willerton could hear the seconds dropping on the tin roof outside. He’d dart at her again but she’d have the knife ready and would plunge it into him in an instant—Miss Willerton could stand it no longer. She struck the woman a terrific blow on the head from behind. The knife dropped out of her hands and a mist swept her from the room. Miss Willerton turned to Lot. “Let me get you some hot grits,” she said. She went over to the stove and got a clean plate of smooth white grits and a piece of butter.
“Gee, thanks,” Lot said and smiled at her with his nice teeth. “You always fix ‘em just right. You know,” he said, “I been thinkin’—we could get out of this tenant farm. We could have a decent place. If we made anything this year over, we could put it in a cowan’ start buildin’ things up. Think what it would mean, Willie, just think.”
She sat down beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll do it,” she said. “We’ll make better than we’ve made any year and by spring we should have us that cow.”
“You always know how I feel, Willie,” he said. “You always have known.”
They sat there for a long time thinking of how well they understood each other. “Finish your food,” she said finally.
After he had eaten, he helped her take the ashes out the stove and then, in the hot July evening, they walked down the pasture toward the creek and talked about the place they were going to have some day.
When late March came and the rainy season was almost there, they had accomplished almost more than was believable. For the past month, Lot had been up every morning at five, and Willy an hour earlier to get in all the work they could while the weather was clear. Next week, Lot said, the rain would probably start and if they didn’t get the crop in by then, they would lose it—and all they had gained in the past months. They knew what that meantanother year of getting along with no more than they’d had the last. Then too, there’d be a baby next year instead of a cow. Lot had wanted the cow anyway. “Children don’t cost all that much to feed,” he’d argued, “an’ the cow would help feed him,” but Willie had been firm—the cow could come later—the child must have a good start. “Maybe,” Lot had said finally, “we’ll have enough for both,” and he had gone out to look at the new-plowed ground as if he could count the harvest from the furrows.
Even with as little as they’d had, it had been a good year. Willie had cleaned the shack, and Lot had fixed the chimney. There was a profusion of petunias by the doorstep and a colony of snapdragons under the window. It had been a peaceful year. But now they were becoming anxious over the crop. They must gather it before the rain. “We need another week,” Lot muttered when he came in that night. “One more week an’ we can do it. Do you feel like gatherin’? It isn’t right that you should have to,” he sighed, “but I can’t hire any help.”
“I’m all right,” she said, hiding her trembling hands behind her. “I’ll gather.”
“It’s cloudy tonight,” Lot said darkly.
The next day they worked until nightfall—worked until they could work no longer and then stumbled back to the cabin and fell into bed.
Willie woke in the night conscious of a pain. It was a soft, green pain with purple lights running through it. She wondered if she were awake. Her head rolled from side to side and there were droning shapes grinding boulders in it.
Lot sat up. “Are you bad off?” he asked, trembling.
She raised herself on her elbow and then sank down again. “Get Anna up by the creek,” she gasped.
The droning became louder and the shapes grayer. The pain intermingled with them for seconds first, then interminably. It came again and again. The sound of the droning grew more distinct and toward morning she realized that it was rain. Later she asked hoarsely, “How long has it been raining?”
“Most two days, now,” Lot answered.
“Then we lost.” Willie looked listlessly out at the dripping trees.
“It’s over.”
“It isn’t over,” he said softly. “We got a daughter.”
“You wanted a son.”
“No, I got what I wanted—two Willies instead of one—that’s better than a cow, even,” he grinned. “What can I do to deserve all I got, Willie?” He bent over and kissed her forehead.
“What can I?” she asked slowly. “And what can I do to help you more?”
“How about your going to the grocery, Willie?”
Miss Willerton shoved Lot away from her. “What did you say, Lucia?” she stuttered.
“I said how about your going to the grocery this time? I’ve been every morning this week and I’m busy now.”
Miss Willerton pushed back from the typewriter. “Very well,” she said sharply. “What do you want there?”
“A dozen eggs and two pounds of tomatoes—ripe tomatoes—and you’d better start doctoring that cold right now. Your eyes are already watering and you’re hoarse. There’s Empirin in the bathroom.
Write a check on the house for the groceries. And wear your coat. It’s cold.”
Miss Willerton rolled her eyes upward. “I am forty-four years old,” she announced, “and able to take care of myself.”
“And get ripe tomatoes,” Miss Lucia returned.
Miss Willerton, her coat buttoned unevenly, tramped up Broad Street and into the supermarket. “What was it now?” she muttered. “Two dozen eggs and a pound of tomatoes, yes.” She passed the lines of canned vegetables and the crackers and headed for the box where the eggs were kept. But there were no eggs. “Where are the eggs?” she asked a boy weighing snapbeans.
“We ain’t got nothin’ but pullet eggs,” he said, fishing up another handful of beans.
“Well, where are they and what is the difference?” Miss Willerton demanded.
He threw several beans back into the bin, slouched over to the egg box and handed her a carton. “There ain’t no difference really,” he said, pushing his gum over his front teeth. “A teen-age chicken or somethin’, I don’t know. You want ‘em?”
“Yes, and two pounds of tomatoes. Ripe tomatoes,” Miss Willerton added. She did not like to do the shopping. There was no reason those clerks should be so condescending. That boy wouldn’t have dawdled with Lucia. She paid for the eggs and tomatoes and left hurriedly. The place depressed her somehow.
Silly that a grocery should depress one—nothing in it but trifling domestic doings—women buying beans—riding children in those grocery go-carts—higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash—what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? All around her it was the same—sidewalks full of people scurrying about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full of little packages—that woman there with the child on the leash, pulling him, jerking him, dragging him away from a window with a jack-o’-lantern in it; she would probably be pulling and jerking him the rest of her life. And there was another, dropping a shopping bag all over the street, and another wiping a child’s nose, and up the street an old woman was coming with three grandchildren jumping all over her, and behind them was a couple walking too close for refinement.
Miss WiIIerton looked at the couple sharply as they came nearer and passed. The woman was plump with yellow hair and fat ankles and muddy-colored eyes. She had on high-heel pumps and blue anklets, a too-short cotton dress, and a plaid jacket. Her skin was mottled and her neck thrust forward as if she were sticking it out to smell something that was always being drawn away. Her face was set in an inane grin. The man was long and wasted and shaggy. His shoulders were stooped and there were yellow knots along the side of his large, red neck. His hands fumbled stupidly with the girl’s as they slumped along, and once or twice he smiled sickly at her and Miss Willerton could see that he had straight teeth and sad eyes and a rash over his forehead.
“Ugh,” she shuddered.
Miss Willerton laid the groceries all the kitchen table and went back to her typewriter. She looked at the paper in it. “Lot Motun called his dog,” it read. “The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him. He pulled the animal’s short, scraggy ears and rolled over with it in the mud.”
“That sounds awful!” Miss Willerton muttered. “It’s not a good subject anyway,” she decided. She needed something more colorful—more arty. Miss Willerton looked at her typewriter for a long time. Then of a sudden her fist hit the desk in several ecstatic little bounces. “The Irish!” she squealed. “The Irish!” Miss Willerton had always admired the Irish. Their brogue, she thought, was full of music; and their history—splendid! And the people, she mused, the Irish people! They were full of spirit-red-haired, with broad shoulders and great, drooping mustaches.
The Turkey (1947)
HIS guns glinted sun steel in the ribs of the tree and, half aloud through a crack in his mouth, he growled, “All right, Mason, this is as far as you go. The jig’s up.” The six-shooters in Mason’s belt stuck out like waiting rattlers but he flipped them into the air and, when they fell at his feet, kicked them behind him like so many dried steer skulls. “You varmit,” he muttered, drawing his rope tight around the captured man’s ankles, “this is the last rustlin’ you’ll do.” He took three steps backward and leveled one gun to his eye. “Okay,” he said with cold, slow precision, “this is…. ” And then he saw it, just moving slightly through the bushes farther over, a touch of bronze and a rustle and then, through another gap in the leaves, the eye, set in red folds that covered the head and hung down along the neck, trembling slightly. He stood perfectly still and the turkey took another step, then stopped, with one foot lifted, and listened.
If he only had a gun, if he only had a gun! He could level aim and shoot it right where it was. In a second, it would slide through the bushes and be up in a tree before he could tell which direction it had gone in. Without moving his head, he strained his eyes to the ground to see if there were a stone near, but the ground looked as if it might just have been swept. The turkey moved again. The foot that had been poised half way up went down and the wing dropped over it, spreading so that Ruller could see the long single feathers, pointed at the end. He wondered if he dived into the bush on top of it …. It moved again and the wing came up again and it went down.
It’s limping, he thought quickly. He moved a little nearer, trying to make his motion imperceptible. Suddenly its head pierced out of the bush-he was about ten feet from it-and drew back and then abruptly back into the bush. He began edging nearer with his arms rigid and his fingers ready to clutch. It was lame, he could tell. It might not be able to fly. It shot its head out once more and saw him and shuttled back into the bushes and out again on the other side. Its motion was half lopsided and the left wing was dragging. He was going to get it. He was going to get it if he had to chase it out of the county. He crawled through the brush and saw it about twenty feet away, watching him warily, moving its neck up and down. It stooped and tried to spread its wings and stooped again and went a little way to the side and stooped again, trying to make itself go up; but, he could tell, it couldn’t fly. He was going to have it. He was going to have it if he had to run it out of the state. He saw himself going in the front door with it slung over his shoulder, and them all screaming, “Look at Ruller with that wild turkey! Ruller! where did you get that wild turkey?”
Oh, he had caught it in the woods; he had thought they might like to have him catch them one.
“You crazy bird,” he muttered, “you can’t fly. I’ve already got you.” He was walking in a wide circle, trying to get behind it. For a second, he almost thought he could go pick it up. It had dropped down and one foot was sprawled, but when he got near enough to pounce, it shot off in a heavy speed that made him start. He tore after it, straight out in the open for a half acre of dead cotton; then it went under a fence and into some woods again and he had to get on his hands and knees to get under the fence but still keep his eye on the turkey but not tear his shirt; and then dash after it again with his head a little dizzy, but faster to catch up with it. If he lost it in the woods, it would be lost for good; it was going for the bushes on the other side. It would go on out in the road. He was going to have it. He saw it dart through a thicket and he headed for the thicket and when he got there it darted out again and in a second disappeared under a hedge. He went through the hedge fast and heard his shirt rip and felt cool streaks on his arms where they were getting scratched. He stopped a second and looked down at his torn shirt sleeves but the turkey was only a little ahead of him and he could see it go over the edge of the hill and down again into an open space and he darted on. If he came in with the turkey, they wouldn’t pay any attention to his shirt. Hane hadn’t ever got a turkey. Hane hadn’t ever caught anything. He guessed they’d be knocked out when they saw him; he guessed they’d talk about it in bed. That’s what they did about him and Hane. Hane didn’t know; he never woke up. Ruller woke up every night exactly at the time they started talking. He and Hane slept in one room and their mother and father in the next and the door was left open between and every night Ruller listened. His father would say finally, “How are the boys doing?” and their mother would say, Lord, they were wearing her to a frazzle, Lord, she guessed she shouldn’t worry but how could she help worrying about Hane, the way he was now? Hane had always been an unusual boy, she said. She said he would grow up to be an unusual man too; and their father said yes, if he didn’t get put in the penitentiary first, and their mother said how could he talk that way? and they argued just like Ruller and Hane and sometimes Ruller couldn’t get back to sleep for thinking. He always felt tired when he got through listening but he woke up every night and listened just the same, and whenever they started talking about him, he sat up in bed so he could hear better. Once his father asked why Ruller played by himself so much and his mother said how was she to know? if he wanted to play by himself, she didn’t see any reason he shouldn’t; and his father said that worried him and she said well, if that was all he had to worry about, he’d do well to stop; someone told her, she said, that they had seen Hane at the Ever-Ready; hadn’t they told him he couldn’t go there?
His father asked Ruller the next day what he had been doing lately and Ruller said, “playing by himself,” and walked off sort of like he had a limp. He guessed his father had looked pretty worried. He guessed he’d think it was something when he came home with the turkey slung over his shoulder. The turkey was heading out into a road and for a gutter along the side of it. It ran along the gutter and Ruller was gaining on it all the time until he fell over a root sticking up and spilled the things out of his pockets and had to snatch them up. When he got up, it was out of sight.
“Bill, you take a posse and go down South Canyon; Joe, you cut around by the gorge and head him off,” he shouted to his men. “I’ll follow him this way.” And he dashed off again along the ditch.
The turkey was in the ditch, not thirty feet from him, lying almost on its neck panting, and he was nearly a yard from it before it darted off again. He chased it straight until the ditch ended and then it went out in the road and slid under a hedge on the other side. He had to stop at the hedge and catch his breath and he could see the turkey on the other side through the leaves, lying on its neck, its whole body moving up and down with the panting. He could see the tip of its tongue going up and down in its opened bill. If he could stick his arm through, he might could get it while it was still too tired to move. He pushed up closer to the hedge and eased his hand through and then gripped it quickly around the turkey’s tail. There was no movement from the other side. Maybe the turkey had dropped dead. He put his face close to the leaves to look through. He pushed the twigs aside with one hand but they would not stay. He let go the turkey and pulled his other hand through to hold them. Through the hole he had made, he saw the bird wobbling off drunkenly. He ran back to where the hedge began and got on the other side. He’d get it yet. It needn’t think it was so smart, he muttered.
It zigged across the middle of the field and toward the woods again. It couldn’t go into the woods! He’d never get it! He dashed behind it, keeping his eyes sharp on it until suddenly something hit his chest and knocked the breath black out of him. He fell back on the ground and forgot the turkey for the cutting in his chest. He lay there for a while with things rocking on either side of him. Finally he sat up. He was facing the tree he had run into. He rubbed his hands over his face and arms and the long scratches began to sting. He would have taken it in slung over his shoulder and they would have jumped up and yelled, “Good Lord look at Ruller! Ruller! Where did you get that wild turkey?” and his father would have said, “Man! That’s a bird if I ever saw one!” He kicked a stone away from his foot. He’d never see the turkey now. He wondered why he had seen it in the first place if he wasn’t going to be able to get it.
It was like somebody had played a dirty trick on him.
All that running for nothing. He sat there looking sullenly at his white ankles sticking out of his trouser legs and into his shoes. “Nuts,” he muttered. He turned over on his stomach and let his cheek rest right on the ground, dirty or not. He had torn his shirt and scratched his arms and got a knot on his forehead-he could feel it rising just a little, it was going to be a big one all right-all for nothing. The ground was cool to his face, but the grit bruised it and he had to turn over.
Oh hell, he thought.
“Oh hell,” he said cautiously.
Then in a minute he said just, “Hell.”
Then he said it like Hane said it, pulling the e-ull out and trying to get the look in his eye that Hane got. Once Hane said, “God!” and his mother stomped after him and said, “I don’t want to hear you say that again. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, Thy God, in vain. Do you hear me?” and he guessed that shut Hane up. Hal He guessed she dressed him off that time.
“God,” he said.
He looked studiedly at the ground, making circles in the dust with his finger. “God!” he repeated.
“God dammit,” he said softly. He could feel his face getting hot and his chest thumping all of a sudden inside. ”God dammit to hell,” he said almost inaudibly. He looked over his shoulder but no one was there.
“God dammit to hell, good Lord from Jerusalem,” he said. His uncle said “Good Lord from Jerusalem.”
“Good Father, good God, sweep the chickens out the yard,” he said and began to giggle. His face was very red. He sat up and looked at his white ankles sticking out of his pants legs into his shoes. They looked like they didn’t belong to him. He gripped a hand around each ankle and bent his knees up and rested his chin on a knee. “Our Father Who art in heaven, shoot ‘em six and roll ‘em seven,” he said, giggling again. Boy, she’d smack his head in if she could hear him. God dammit, she’d smack his goddam head in. He rolled over in a fit of laughter. God dammit, she’d dress him off and wring his goddam neck like a goddam chicken. The laughing cut his side and he tried to hold it in, but every time he thought of his goddam neck, he shook again. He lay back on the ground, red and weak with laughter, not able not to think of her smacking his goddam head in. He said the words over and over to himself and after a while he stopped laughing. He said them again but the laughing had gone out. He said them again but it wouldn’t start back up. All that chasing for nothing, he thought again. He might as well go home. What did he want to be sitting around here for? He felt suddenly like he would if people had been laughing at him. Aw, go to hell, he told them. He got up and kicked his foot sharply into somebody’s leg and said, “Take that, sucker,” and turned into the woods to take the short trail home.
And as soon as he got in the door, they would holler, “How did you tear your clothes and where did you get that knot on your forehead?” He was going to say he fell in a hole. What difference would it make? Yeah, God, what difference would it make?
He almost stopped. He had never heard himself think that tone before. He wondered should he take the thought back. He guessed it was pretty bad; but heck, it was the way he felt. He couldn’t help feeling that way. Heck … hell, it was the way he felt. He guessed he couldn’t help that. He walked on a little way, thinking, thinking about it. He wondered suddenly if he were going “bad.” That’s what Hane had done. Hane played pool and smoked cigarettes and sneaked in at twelve-thirty and boy he thought he was something. ”There’s nothing you can do about,” their grandmother had told their father, “he’s at that age.” What age? Ruller wondered. I’m eleven, he thought. That’s pretty young. Hane hadn’t started until he was fifteen. I guess it’s worse in me, he thought. He wondered would he fight it. Their grandmother had talked to Hane and told him the only way to conquer the devil was to fight him-if he didn’t, he couldn’t be her boy any more-Ruller sat down on a stump-and she said she’d give him one more chance, did he want it? and he yelled at her, no! and would she leave him alone? and she told him, well, she loved him even if he didn’t love her and he was her boy anyway and so was Ruller. Oh no, I ain’t, Ruller thought quickly. Oh no. She’s not pinning any of that stuff on me.
Boy, he could shock the pants off her. He could make her teeth fall in her soup. He started giggling. The next time she asked him if he wanted to playa game of parcheesi, he’d say, hell no, goddammit, didn’t she know any good games? Get out her goddam cards and he’d show her a few. He rolled over on the ground, choking with laughter. “Let’s have some booze, kid,” he’d say. “Let’s get stinky.” Boy, he’d knock her out of her socks! He sat on the ground, red and grinning to himself, bursting every now and then into a fresh spasm of giggles. He remembered the minister had said young men were going to the devil by the dozens this day and age; forsaking gentle ways; walking in the tracks of Satan. They would rue the day, he said. There would be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ”Weeping,” Ruller muttered. Men didn’t weep.
How do you gnash your teeth? he wondered. He grated his jaws together and made an ugly face. He did it several times.
He bet he could steal.
He thought about chasing the turkey for nothing. It was a dirty trick. He bet he could be a jewel thief. They were smart. He bet he could have all Scotland Yard on his tail. Hell.
He got up. God could go around sticking things in your face and making you chase them all afternoon for nothing.
You shouldn’t think that way about God, though.
But that was the way he felt. If that was the way he felt, could he help it? He looked around quickly as if someone might be hiding in the bushes; then suddenly he started.
It was rolled over at the edge of a thicket-a pile of ruffled bronze with a red head lying limp along the ground. Ruller stared at it, unable to think; then he leaned forward suspiciously. He wasn’t going to touch it. Why was it there now for him to take? He wasn’t going to touch it. It could just lie there. The picture of himself walking in the room with it slung over his shoulder came back to him. Look at Ruller with that turkey! Lord, look at Ruller! He squatted down beside it and looked without touching it. He wondered what had been wrong with its wing. He lifted it up by the tip and looked under. The feathers were blood-soaked. It had been shot. It must weigh ten pounds, he figured.
Lord, Ruller! It’s a huge turkey! He wondered how it would feel slung over his shoulder. Maybe, he considered, he was supposed to take it.
Ruller gets our turkeys for us. Ruller got it in the woods, chased it dead. Yes, he’s a very unusual child.
Ruller wondered suddenly if he were an unusual child.
It came down on him in an instant: he was … an … unusual … child.
He reckoned he was more unusual than Hane.
He had to worry more than Hane because he knew more how things were.
Sometimes when he was listening at night, he heard them arguing like they were going to kill each other; and the next day his father would go out early and his mother would have the blue veins out on her forehead and look like she was expecting a snake to jump from the ceiling any minute. He guessed he was one of the most unusual children ever. Maybe that was why the turkey was there. He rubbed his hand along the neck. Maybe it was to keep him from going bad. Maybe God wanted to keep him from that.
Maybe God had knocked it out right there where he’d see it when he got up.
Maybe God was in the bush now, waiting for him to make up his mind. Ruller blushed. He wondered if God could think he was a very unusual child. He must. He found himself suddenly blushing and grinning and he rubbed his hand over his face quick to make himself stop. If You want me to take it, he said, I’ll be glad to. Maybe finding the turkey was a sign. Maybe God wanted him to be a preacher. He thought of Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy. He might found a place for boys to stay who were going bad. He lifted the turkey up-it was heavy all right-and fitted it over his shoulder. He wished he could see how he looked with it slung over like that. It occurred to him that he might as well go home the long way through town. He had plenty of time. He started off slowly, shifting the turkey until it fit comfortably over his shoulder. He remembered the things he had thought before he found the turkey. They were pretty bad, he guessed.
He guessed God had stopped him before it was too late. He should be very thankful. Thank You, he said.
Come on, boys, he said, we will take this turkey back for our dinner. We certainly are much obliged to You, he said to God. This turkey weighs ten pounds. You were mighty generous.
That’s okay, God said. And listen, we ought to have a talk about these boys. They’re entirely in your hands, see? I’m leaving the job strictly up to you. I have confidence in you, McFarney.
You can trust me, Ruller said. I’ll come through with the goods.
He went into town with the turkey over his shoulder. He wanted to do something for God but he didn’t know what he could do. If anybody was playing the accordion on the street today, he’d give them his dime. He only had one dime, but he’d give it to them. Maybe he could think of something better, though. He had been going to keep the dime for something. He might could get another one from his grandmother. How about a goddam dime, kid? He pulled his mouth piously out of the grin. He wasn’t going to think that way any more. He couldn’t get a dime from her anyway. His mother was going to whip him if he asked his grandmother for money again. Maybe something would turn up that he could do. If God wanted him to do something, He’d turn something up.
He was getting into the business block and through the corner of his eye he noticed people looking at him. There were eight thousand people in Mulrose County and on Saturday everyone of them was in Tilford on the business block. They turned as Ruller passed and looked at him. He glanced at himself reflected in a store window, shifted the turkey slightly, and walked quickly ahead. He heard someone call, but he walked on, pretending he was deaf. It was his mother’s friend, Alice Gilhard, and if she wanted him, let her catch up with him.
“Ruller!” she cried. “My goodness, where did you get that turkey?” She came up behind him fast and put her hand on his shoulder. “That’s some bird,” she said. “You must be a good shot.”
“I didn’t shoot it,” Ruller said coldly. “I captured it. I chased it dead.”
“Heavens,” she said. “You wouldn’t capture me one sometime, would you?”
“I might if I ever have time,” Ruller said. She thought she was so cute.
Two men came over and whistled at the turkey. They yelled at some other men on the corner to look. Another of his mother’s friends stopped and some country boys who had been sitting on the curb got up and tried to see the turkey without showing they were interested. A man with a hunting suit and gun stopped and looked at Ruller and walked around behind him and looked at the turkey.
“How much do you think it weighs?” a lady asked.
“At least ten pounds,” Ruller said.
“How long did you chase it?”
“About an hour,” Ruller said.
“The goddam imp,” the man in the hunting suit muttered.
“That’s really amazing,” a lady commented.
“About that long,” Ruller said.
“You must be very tired.”
“No,” Ruller said. “I have to go. I’m in a hurry.” He worked his face to look as if he were thinking something out and hurried down the street until he was out of their view. He felt warm all over and nice as if something very fine were going to be or had been. He looked back once and saw that the country boys were following him. He hoped they would come up and ask to look at the turkey. God must be wonderful, he felt suddenly. He wanted to do something for God. He hadn’t seen anyone playing the accordion, though, or selling pencils and he was past the business block. He might see one before he really got to the streets where people lived at. If he did, he’d give away the dime-even while he knew he couldn’t get another one any time soon. He began to wish he would see somebody begging.
Those country kids were still trailing along behind him. He thought he might stop and ask them did they want to see the turkey; but they might just stare at him. They were tenants’ children and sometimes tenants’ children just stared at you. He might found a home for tenants’ children. He thought about going back through town to see if he had passed a beggar without seeing him, but he decided people might think he was showing off with the turkey.
Lord, send me a beggar, he prayed suddenly. Send me one before I get home. He had never thought before of praying on his own, but it was a good idea. God had put the turkey there. He’d send him a beggar. He knew for a fact God would send him one. He was on Hill Street now and there were nothing but houses on Hill Street. It would be strange to find a beggar here. The sidewalks were empty except for a few children and some tricycles. Ruller looked back; the country boys were still following him. He decided to slow down. It might make them catch up with him and it might give a beggar more time to get to him. If one were coming. He wondered if one were coming. If one came, it would mean God had gone out of His way to get one. It would mean God was really interested. He had a sudden fear one wouldn’t come; it was a whole fear quick.
One will come, he told himself. God was interested in him because he was a very unusual child. He went on. The streets were deserted now. He guessed one wouldn’t come. Maybe God didn’t have confidence in-no, God did. Lord, please send me a beggar! he implored. He squinched his face rigid and strained his muscles in a knot and said, “Please! one right now”; and the minute he said it -the minute-Hetty Gilman turned around the corner before him, heading straight to where he was.
He felt almost like he had when he ran into the tree.
She was walking down the street right toward him. It was just like the turkey lying there. It was just as if she had been hiding behind a house until he came by. She was an old woman whom everybody said had more money than anybody in town because she had been begging for twenty years. She sneaked into people’s houses and sat until they gave her something. If they didn’t, she cursed them. Nevertheless, she was a beggar. Ruller walked faster. He took the dime out of his pocket so it would be ready. His heart was stomping up and down in his chest. He made a noise to see if he could talk. As they neared each other, he stuck out his hand. ”Here!” he shouted. “Here!”
She was a tall, long-faced old woman in an antique black cloak. Her face was the color of a dead chicken’s skin. When she saw him, she looked as if she suddenly smelled something bad. He darted at her and thrust the dime into her hand and dashed on without looking back.
Slowly his heart calmed and he began to feel full of a new feeling-like being happy and embarrassed at the same time. Maybe, he thought, blushing, he would give all his money to her. He felt as if the ground did not need to be under him any longer. He noticed suddenly that the country boys’ feet were shuffling just behind him, and almost without thinking, he turned and asked graciously, “You all wanta see this turkey?”
They stopped where they were and stared at him. One in front spit. Ruller looked down at it quickly. There was real tobacco juice in it! “Wheered you git that turkey?” the spitter asked.
“I found it in the woods,” Ruller said. “I chased it dead. See, it’s been shot under the wing.” He took the turkey off his shoulder and held it down where they could see. “I think it was shot twice,” he went on excitedly, pulling the wing up.
“Lemme see it here,” the spitter said.
Ruller handed him the turkey. “You see down there where the bullet hole is?” he asked. “Well, I think it was shot twice in the same hole, I think it was …. ” The turkey’s head flew in his face as the spitter slung it up in the air and over his own shoulder and turned. The others turned with him and together they sauntered off in the direction they had come, the turkey sticking stiff out on the spitter’s back and its head swinging slowly in a circle as he walked away.
They were in the next block before Ruller moved. Finally, he realized that he could not even see them any longer, they were so far away. He turned toward home, almost creeping. He walked four blocks and then suddenly, noticing that it was dark, he began to run. He ran faster and faster, and as he turned up the road to his house, his heart was running as fast as his legs and he was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch.
The Train (1947)
THINKING about the porter, he had almost forgotten the berth.
He had an upper one. The man in the station had said he could give him a lower and Haze had asked didn’t he have no upper ones; the man said sure if that was what he wanted, and gave him an upper one. Leaning back on the seat, Haze had seen how the ceiling was rounded over him. It was in there. They pulled the ceiling down and it was in there, and you climbed up to it on a ladder. He hadn’t seen any ladders around; he reckoned they kept them in the closet. The closet was up where you came in. When he first got on the train, he had seen the porter standing in front of the closet, putting on his porter’s jacket. Haze had stopped right then—right where he was.
The turn of his head was like and the back of his neck was like and the short reach of his arm. He turned away from the closet and looked at Haze and Haze saw his eyes and they were like; they were the same-same as old Cash’s for the first instant, and then different. They turned different while he was looking at them; hardened flat. “Whu… what time do you pull down the beds?” Haze mumbled.
“Long time yet,” the porter said, reaching into the closet again.
Haze didn’t know what else to say to him. He went on to his section.
Now the train was greyflying past instants of trees and quick spaces of field and a motionless sky that sped darkening away in the opposite direction. Haze leaned his head back on the seat and looked out the window, the yellow light of the train lukewarm on him. The porter had passed twice, twice back and twice forward, and the second time forward he had looked sharply at Haze for an instant and passed on without saying anything; Haze had turned and stared after him as he had done the time before. Even his walk was like. All them gulch niggers resembled. They looked like their own kind of nigger-heavy and bald, rock all through. Old Cash in his day had been two hundred pounds heavy—no fat on him—and five feet high with not more than two inches over. Haze wanted to talk to the porter. What would the porter say when he told him: I’m from Eastrod? What would he say?
The train had come to Evansville. A lady got on and sat opposite Haze. That meant she would have the berth under him. She said she thought it was going to snow. She said her husband had driven her down to the station and he said if it didn’t snow before he got home, he’d be surprised. He had ten miles to go; they lived in the suburbs. She was going to Florida to visit her daughter. She had never had time to take a trip that far off. The way things happened, one thing right after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn’t tell if you were old or young. She looked as if it had been cheating her, going double quick when she was asleep and couldn’t watch it. Haze was glad to have someone there talking.
He remembered when he was a little boy, him and his mother and the other children would go into Chattanooga on the Tennessee Railroad. His mother had always started up a conversation with the other people on the train. She was like an old bird dog just unpenned that raced, sniffing up every rock and stick and sucking in the air around everything she stopped at. There wasn’t a person she hadn’t spoken to by the time they were ready to get off. She remembered them too. Long years after, she would say she wondered where the lady was who was going to Fort West, or she wondered if the man who was selling Bibles had ever got his wife out the hospital. She had a hankering for people—as if what happened to the ones she talked to happened to her then. She was a Jackson. Annie Lou Jackson.
My mother was a Jackson, Haze said to himself. He had stopped listening to the lady although he was still looking at her and she thought he was listening. My name is Hazel Wickers, he said. I’m nineteen. My mother was a Jackson. I was raised in Eastrod, Eastrod, Tennessee; he thought about the porter again. He was going to ask the porter. It struck him suddenly that the porter might even be Cash’s son. Cash had a son run away. It happened before Haze’s time. Even so, the porter would know Eastrod.
Haze glanced out the window at the shapes black—spinning past him. He could shut his eyes and make Eastrod at night out of any of them—he could find the two houses with the road between and the store and the nigger houses and the one barn and the piece of fence that started out into the pasture, gray-white when the moon was on it. He could put the mule face, solid, over the fence and let it hang there, feeling how the night was. He felt it himself. He felt it light-touching around him. He seen his ma coming up the path, wiping her hands on an apron she had taken off, looking like the night change was on her, and then standing in the doorway: Haaazzzzeeeee, Ha. rzzzeee, come in here. The train said it for him. He wanted to get up and go find the porter.
“Are you going home?” Mrs. Hosen asked him. Her name was Mrs. Wallace Ben Hasen; she had been a Miss Hitchcock before she married.
“Oh!” Haze said, startled—“I get off at, I get off at Taulkinham.”
Mrs. Hasen knew some people in Evansville who had a cousin in Taulkinham—a Mr. Henrys, she thought. Being from Taulkinham, Haze might know him. Had he ever heard the….
“Taulkinham ain’t where I’m from,” Haze muttered. “I don’t know nothin ‘ about Taulkinham.” He didn’t look at Mrs. Hasen. He knew what she was going to ask next and he felt it coming and it came, “Well, where do you live?”
He wanted to get away from her. “It was there,” he mumbled, squirming in the seat. Then he said, “I don’t rightly know, I was there but… this is just the third time I been at Taulkinham,” he said quickly—her face had crawled out and was staring at him—“I ain’t been since I went when I was six. I don’t know nothin’ about it. Once I seen a circus there but not…” He heard a clanking at the end of the car and looked to see where it was coming from. The porter was pulling the walls of the sections farther alit. “I got to see the porter a minute,” he said and escaped down the aisle—. He didn’t know what he’d say to the porter. He got to him and he still didn’t know what he’d say. “I reckon you’re fixing to make. them up now,” he said.
“That’s right,” the porter said.
“How long does it take you to make one up?” Haze asked.
“Seven minutes,” the porter said.
‘I’m from Eastrod,” Haze said. “I’m from Eastrod, Tennessee.”
“That isn’t on this line,” the porter said. “You on the wrong train if you counting on going to any such place as that.”
‘I’m going to Taulkinharn,” Haze saidl. “I was raised in Eastrod.”
“You want your berth made up now;” the porter asked.
“Huh?” Haze said. “Eastrod, Tennessee; ain’t you ever heard Eastrod?”
The porter wrenched one side of the scat flat. “I’m from Chicago,” he said. He jerked the shades down on either window and wrenched the other seat down. Even the back of his neck was like. When bent over, it came out in three bulges. He was from Chicago. “You standing in the middle of the aisle. Somebody gonna want to get past you,” he said, suddenly turning on Hazw.
“I reckon I’ll go sit down some,” Haze said, blushing.
He knew people were staring at him as he went back to his section. Mrs. Hosen was looking out the window. She turned and eyed him suspiciously; then she said it hadn’t snowed yet, had it? and relaxed into a stream of talk. She guessed her husband was getting his own supper tonight. She was paying a girl to come cook his dinner but he was having to get his own supper. She didn’t think that hurt a man once in a while. She thought it did him good. Wallace wasn’t lazy but he didn’t think what it took keep going with housework all day. She didn’t know how it would feel to be in Florida with somebody waiting on her.
He was from Chicago.
This was her first vacation in five years. Five years ago she had gone to visit her sister in Grand Rapids. Time flies. Her sister had left Grand Rapids and moved to Waterloo. She didn’t suppose she’d recognize her sister’s children if she saw them now. Her sister wrote they were as big as their father. Things changed fast, she said. Her sister’s husband had worked with the city water supply in Grand Rapids—he had a good place—but in Waterloo, he….
“I went back there last time,” Haze said. “I wouldn’t be getting off at Taulkinham if it was there; it went, apart like, you know. it…”
Mrs. Hosen frowned. “You must be thinking of another Grand Rapids,” she said. “The Grand Rapids I’m talking about is a large city and it’s always where it’s always been.” She stared at him for a moment and then went on: when they were in Grand Rapids they got along fine, but in Waterloo he suddenly took to liquor. Her sister had to support the house and educate the children. It beat Mrs. Hosen how he could sit there year after year.
Haze’s mother had never talked much on the train; she mostly listened. She was a Jackson.
After a while Mrs. Hosen said she was hungry and asked him if he wanted to go into the diner. He did.
The dining car was full and people were waiting to get in it. Haze and Mrs. Hosen stood in line for a half hour, rocking in the narrow passageway and every few minutes flattening themselves against the side to let a trickle of people through. Mrs. Hosen began talking to the lady on the side of her. Haze stared stupidly at the wall. He would never have had the courage to come to the diner by himself; it was fine he had met Mrs. Hosen. If she hadn’t been talking, he would have told her intelligently that he had gone there the last time and that the porter was not from there but that he looked near enough like a gulch nigger to be one, near enough like old Cash to be his child. He’d tell her while they were eating. He couldn’t see inside the diner from where he was; he wondered what it would be like in there. Like a restaurant, he reckoned. He thought of the berth. By the time they got through eating, the berth would probably be made up and he could get in it. What would his ma say if she seen him having a berth in a train! He bet she never reckoned that would happen. As they got nearer the entrance to the diner he could see in. It was like a city restaurant! He bet she never reckoned it was like that.
The head man was beckoning to the people at the first of the line every time someone left—sometimes for one person, sometimes for more. He motioned for two people and the line moved up so that Haze and Mrs. Hosen and the lady she was talking to were standing at the end of the diner, looking in. In a minute, two more people left. The man beckoned and Mrs. Hosen and the lady walked in, and Haze followed them. The man stopped Haze and said, “Only two,” and pushed him back to the doorway. Haze’s face went an ugly red. He tried to get behind the next person and then he tried to get through the line to go back to the car he had come from, but there were too many people bunched in the opening. He had to stand there while everyone around looked at him. No one left for a while and he had to stand there. Mrs. Hosen did not look at him again. Finally a lady up at the far end got up and the head man jerked his hand and Haze hesitated and saw the hand jerk again and then lurched up the aisle, falling against two tables on the way and getting his hand wet with somebody’s coffee. He didn’t look at the people he sat down with. He ordered the first thing on the menu and, when it came, ate it without thinking what it might be. The people he was sitting with had finished and, he could tell, were waiting, watching him eat.
When he got out the diner he was weak and his hands were making small jittery movements by themselves. It seemed a year ago that he had seen the head man beckon to him to sit down. He stopped between two cars and breathed in the cold air to clear his head. It helped. When he got back to his car all the berths were made up and the aisles were dark and sinister, hung in heavy green. He realized again that he had a berth, an upper one, and that he could get in it now. He could lie down and raise the shade just enough to look out from and watch—what he had planned to do and see how everything went by a train at night. He could look right into the night, moving.
He got his sack and went to the men’s room and put on his night clothes. A sign said to get the porter to let you into the upper berths. The porter might be a cousin of some of them gulch niggers, he thought suddenly; he might ask him if he had any cousins around Eastrod, or maybe just in Tennessee. He went down the aisle, looking for him. They might have a little conversation before he got in the berth. The porter was not at that end of the car and he went back to look at the other encl. Going around the corner, he ran into something heavily pink; it gasped and muttered, “Clumsy!” It was Mrs. Hosen in a pink wrapper with her hair in knots around her head. He had forgotten about her. She was terrifying with her hair slicked back and the knobs like dark toad stools framing her face. She tried to get past him and he tried to let her but they were both moving the same way each time. Her face became purplish except for little white marks over it that didn’t heat up. She drew herself stiff and stopped still and said, “What IS the matter with you?” He slipped past her and dashed down the aisle and ran suddenly into the porter so that the porter slipped and he fell on top of him and the porter’s face was right under his and it was old Cash Simmons. For a minute he couldn’t move off the porter for thinking it was Cash and he breathed, “Cash,” and the porter pushed him off and got up and went down the aisle quick and Haze scrambled off the floor and went after him saying he wanted to get in the berth and thinking, this is Cash’s kin, and then suddenly, like something thrown at him when he wasn’t looking: this is Cash’s son run away; and then: he knows about Eastrod and doesn’t want it, he doesn’t want to talk about it, he doesn’t want to talk about Cash.
He stood staring while the porter put the ladder up to the berth and then he started up it, still looking at the porter, seeing Cash there, only different, not in the eyes, and halfway up the ladder he said, still looking at the porter, “Cash is dead. He got the cholera from a pig.” The porter’s mouth perked down and he muttered, looking at Haze with his eyes thin, “I’m from Chicago. My father was a railroad man.” And Haze stared at him and then laughed: a nigger being a railroad “man”: and laughed again, and the porter jerked the ladder off suddenly with a wrench of his arm that sent Haze clutching at the blanket into the berth.
He lay on his stomach in the berth, trembling from the way he had got in. Cash’s son. From Eastrod. But not wanting Eastrod; hating it. He lay there for a while on his stomach, not moving. It seemed a year since he had fallen over the porter in the aisle.
After a while he remembered that he was actually in the berth and he turned and found the light and looked around him. There was no window.
The side wall did not have a window in it. It didn’t push up to be a window. There was no window concealed in it. There was a fish-net thing stretched across the side wall; but no windows. For a second it flashed through his mind that the porter had done this given him this berth that there were no windows to and had just a fish net strung the length of—because he hated him. But they must all be like this.
The top of the berth was low and curved over. He lay down. The curved top looked like it was not quite closed; it looked like it was closing. He lay there for a while not moving. There was something in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste. He had eggs for supper. They were in the sponge in his throat. They were right in his throat. He didn’t want to turn over for fear they would move; he wanted the light off; he wanted it dark. He reached up without turning and felt for the button and snapped it and the darkness sank down on him and then faded a little with light from the aisle that came in through the foot of space not closed. He wanted it all dark, he didn’t want it diluted. He heard the porter’s footsteps coming down the aisle, soft into the rug, coming steadily down, brushing against the green curtains and fading up the other way out of hearing. He was from Eastrod. From Eastrod but he hated it. Cash wouldn’t have put any claim on him. He wouldn’t have wanted him. He wouldn’t have wanted anything that wore a monkey white coat and toted a whisk broom in his pocket. Cash’s clothes had looked like they’d set a while under a rock; and they smelled like nigger. He thought how Cash smelled, but he smelled the train. No more gulch niggers in Easirod. In Eastrod. Turning in the road, he saw in the dark, half dark, the store boarded and the barn open with the dark free in it, and the smaller house half carted away, the porch gone and no floor in the hall. He had been supposed to go to his sister’s in Taulkinham all his last furlough when he came up from the camp in Georgia but he didn’t want to go to Taulkinham and he had gone back to Eastrod even though he knew how it was: the two families scattered in towns and even the niggers from up and down the road gone into Memphis and Murfreesboro and other places. He had gone back and slept in the house on the floor in the kitchen and a board had fallen on his head out of the roof and cut his face. He jumped, feeling the board, and the train jolted and unjolted and went again. He went looking through the house to see they hadn’t left nothing in it ought to been taken.
His ma always slept in the kitchen and had her walnut shiffer-robe in there. Wasn’t another shiffer-robe nowhere around. She was a Jackson. She had paid thirty dollars for it and hadn’t bought herself nothing else big again. And they had left it. He reckoned they hadn’t had room on the truck for it. He opened all the drawers. There were two lengths of wrapping cord in the top one and nothing in the others. He was surprised nobody had come and stolen a shifler-robe like that. He took the wrapping cord and tied the legs through the floorboards and left a piece of paper in each of the drawers: THIS SHIFFER-ROBE BELONGS TO HAZEL WICKERS. DO NOT STEAL IT OR YOU WILL BE HUNTED DOWN AND KILLED.
She could rest easier knowing it was guarded some. If she come looking any time at night, she would see. He wondered if she walked at night and came there ever—came with that look on her face, unrested and looking, going up the path and through the barn open all around and stopping in the shadow by the store boarded up, coming on unrested with that look on her face like he had seen through the crack going down. He seen her face through the crack when they were shutting the top on her, seen the shadow that came down over her face and pulled her mouth down like she wasn’t satisfied with resting, like she was going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out like a spirit going to be satisfied: but they shut it on down. She might have been going to fly out of there, she might have been going to spring—he saw her terrible like a huge bat darting from the closing—fly out of there but it was falling dark on top of her, closing down all the time, closing down; from inside he saw it closing, coming closer, closer down and cutting off the light and the room and the trees seen through the window through the crack faster and darker closing down. He opened his eyes and saw it closing down and he sprang up between the crack and wedged his body through it and hung there moving, dizzy, with the dim light of the train slowly showing the rug below, moving, dizzy. He hung there wet and cold and saw the porter at the other end of the car, a white shape in the darkness, standing there, watching him and not moving. The tracks curved and he fell back sick into the rushing stillness of the train.
The Peeler (1949)
HAZEL MOTES walked along downtown, close to the store fronts but not looking at them. His neck was thrust forward as if he were trying to smell something that was always being drawn away. He had on a blue suit that was glare-blue in the day time, but looked purplish with the night lights on it, and his hat was a fierce black wool hat like a preacher’s hat, The stores in Taulkinham stayed open on Thursday nights and a lot of people were shopping. Haze’s shadow was now behind him and now before him and now arid then broken up by other people’s shadows, but when it was by itself, stretching behind him, it was a thin nervous shadow walking backwards.
After a while he stopped where a lean-faced man had a card table set up in front of a Lerner’s Dress Shop and was demonstrating a potato peeler. The man had on a small canvas hat and a shirt patterned with bunches of upside down pheasants and quail and bronze turkeys. He was pitching his voice under the street noises so that it reached every ear distinctly as in a private conversation. A few people gathered around. There were two buckets on the card table, one empty and the other full of potatoes. Between the two buckets there was a pyramid of green cardboard boxes and on top of the stack, one peeler was open for demonstration. The man stood in front of this altar, pointing over it at different people. “How about you?” he said, pointing at a damp-haired pimpled boy, “you ain’t gonna let one of these go by?” He stuck a brown potato in one side of the open machine. The machine was a square tin box with a red handle, and as he turned the handle, the potato went into the box and then in a second, backed out the other side, white. “You ain’t gonna let one of these go by!” he said.
The boy guffawed and looked at the other people gathered around. He had yellow slick hair and a fox-shaped face.
“What’s yer name?” the peeler man asked.
“Name Enoch Emery,” the boy said and snuffled.
“Boy with a pretty name like that ought to have one of these,” the man said, rolling his eyes, trying to warm up the others. Nobody laughed but the boy. Then a man standing across from Hazel Motes laughed. He was a tall man with light green glasses and a black suit and a black wool hat like a preacher’s hat, and he was leaning on a white cane. The laugh sounded as if it came from something tied up in a croker sack. It was evident he was a blind man. He had his hand on the shoulder of a big-boned child with a black knitted cap pulled down low on her forehead and a fringe of orange hair sticking out from it on either side. She had a long face and a short sharp nose. The people began to look at the two of them instead of the man selling peelers. This irritated the man selling peelers. “How about you, you there,” he said, pointing at Hazel Motes. “You’ll never be able to get a bargain like this in any store.”
“Hey!” Enoch Emery said, reaching across a woman and punching Haze’s arm. “He’s talking to you! He’s talking to you!” Haze was looking at the blind man and the child. Enoch Emery had to punch him again.
“Whyn’t you take one of these home to yer wife?” the peeler man was saying.
“I ain’t none,” Haze muttered without drawing his attention from the blind man.
“Well, you got a dear old mother, ain’t you?”
“No.”
“Well shaw,” the man said, with his hand cupped to the people, “he needs one theseyer just to keep him company.”
Enoch Emery thought that was so funny that he leaned over and slapped his knee, but Hazel Motes didn’t look as if he had heard it yet. “I’m going to give away half a dozen peeled potatoes to the first person purchasing one theseyer machines,” the man said. “Who’s gonna step up first? Only a dollar and a half for a machine’d cost you three dollars in any store!” Enoch Emery began fumbling in his pockets. “You’ll thank the day you ever stopped here,” the man said, “you’ll never forget it. Ever one of you people purchasing one theseyer machines’ll never forget it.”
The blind man began to move straight forward suddenly and the peeler man got ready to hand him one of the green boxes, but he went past the card table and turned, moving at a right angle back in among the people. He was handing something out. Then Haze saw that the child was moving around too, giving out white leaflets. There were not many people gathered there, but the ones who were began to move off. When the machine-seller saw this, he leaned, glaring, over the card table. “Hey you!” he yelled at the blind man, “what you think you doing? Who you think you are, running people off from here?”
The blind man didn’t pay him any mind. He kept on handing out the pamphlets. He handed one at Enoch Emery and then he came toward Haze, hitting the white cane at an angle from his leg.
“What the hell you think you doing:” the man selling peelers yelled. “I got these people together, how you think you can horn in?”
The blind man had a peculiar boiled looking red face. He thrust one of the pamphlets a little to the side of Haze and Haze grabbed it. It was a tract. The words on the outside of it said, “Jesus Calls You.”
“I’d like to know who the hell you think you are!” the man with the peelers was yelling. The child p”ssed the card table again and handed him a tract. He looked at it fur an instant with his lip curled, and then he charged around the card table, upsetting the bucket of potatoes. “These damn Jesus fanatics,” he yelled, glaring around, trying to find the blind man. More people had gathered, hoping to see a disturbance, and the blind man had disappeared among them. “These goddam Communist Jesus Foreigners!” the peeler man screamed. “I got this crowd together!” He stopped, realizing there was a crowd.
“Listen folks,” he said, “one at a time, there’s plenty to go around, just don’t push, a half dozen peeled potatoes to the first person stepping up to buy.” He got back behind the card table quietly and started holding up the peeler boxes. “Step on up, plenty to go around,” he said, “no need to crowd.”
Hazel Motes didn’t open his tract. He looked at the outside of it and then he tore it across. He put the two pieces together and tore them across again. He kept restacking the pieces and tearing them again until he had a little handful of confetti. He turned his hand over and let the shredded leaflet sprinkle to the ground. Then he looked up and saw the blind man’s child not three feet away, watching him. Her mouth was open and her eyes glittered on him like two chips of green bottle glass. She had on a black dress and there was a white gunny sack hung over her shoulder. Haze scowled and began rubbing his sticky hands on his pants.
“I seen you,” she said. Then she moved quickly over to where the blind man was standing now, beside the card table. Most of the people had moved off.
The peeler man leaned over the card table and said, “Hey!” to the blind man. “I reckon that showed you. Trying to horn in.” But the blind man stood there with his chin tilted back slightly as if he saw something over their heads.
“Lookerhere,” Enoch Emery said, “I ain’t got but a dollar sixteen cent but I…”
“Yah,” the man said, as if he were going to make the blind man see him, “I reckon that’ll show you you can’t muscle in on me. Sold eight peelers, sold…”
“Give me one of them,” the child said, pointing to the peelers.
“Hanh?” he said.
She reached in her pocket and drew out a long coin purse and opened it. “Give me one of them,” she said, holding out two fifty cent pieces.
The man eyed the money with his mouth hiked on one side. “A buck fifty, sister,” he said.
She pulled her hand in quickly and all at once glared around at Hazel Motes as if he had made a noise at her. The blind man was moving off. She stood a second glaring red-faced at Haze and then she turned and followed the blind man. Haze started suddenly.
“Listen,” Enoch Emery said, “I ain’t got but a dollar sixteen cent and I want me one of them…”
“You can keep it,” the man said, taking the bucket off the card table. “This ain’t no cut-rate joint.”
Hazel Motes stood staring after the blind man, jerking his hands in and out of his pockets. He looked as if he were trying to move forward and backward at the same time. Then suddenly he thrust two bills at the man selling peelers and snatched a box off the card table and started down the street. In just a second Enoch Emery was panting at his elbow.
“My, I reckon you got a heap of money,” Enoch Emery said. Haze turned the corner and saw them about a block ahead of him. Then he slowed down some and saw Enoch Emery there. Enoch had on a yellowish white suit with a pinkish white shirt and his tie was a greenpeaish color. He was grinning. He looked like a friendly hound dog with light mange. “How long you been here?” he inquired.
“Two days,” Haze muttered.
“I been here two months,” Enoch said. “I work for the city. Where you work?”
“Not working,” Haze said.
“That’s too bad,” Enoch said. “I work for the city.” He skipped a step to get in line with Haze, then he said, “I’m eighteen year old and I ain’t been here but two months and I already work for the city.”
“That’s fine,” Haze said. He pulled his hat down farther on the side Enoch Emery was on and walked faster.
“I didn’t ketch your name good,” Enoch said.
Haze said his name.
“You look like you might be follering them hicks,” Enoch remarked. “You go in for a lot of Jesus?”
“No,” Haze said.
“No, me neither, not much,” Enoch agreed. “I went to thisyer Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy for four weeks. Thisyer woman that traded me from my daddy she sent me; she was a Welfare woman. Jesus, four weeks and I thought I was gonna be sanctified crazy.”
Haze walked to the end of the block and Enoch stayed all the time at his elbow, panting and talking. When Haze started across the street, Enoch yelled, “Don’t you see theter light! That means you got to wait!” A cop blew a whistle and a car blasted its horn and stopped short. Haze went on across, keeping his eyes on the blind man in the middle of the block, The policeman kept blowing the whistle. He crossed the street over to where Haze was and stopped him. He had a thin face and oval-shaped yellow eyes.
“You know what that little thing hanging up there is for?” he asked, pointing to the traffic light over the intersection.
“I didn’t see it,” Haze said.
The policeman looked at him without saying anything. A few people stopped. He rolled his eyes at them. “Maybe you thought the red ones was for white folks and the green ones for colored,” he said.
“Yeah, I thought that,” Haze said. “Take your hand off me.”
The policeman took his hand off and put it on his hip. He backed one step away and said, “You tell all your friends about these lights. Red is to stop, green is to go—men and women, white folks and niggers, all go on the same light. You tell all your friends so when they come to town, they’ll know.” The people laughed.
“I’ll look after him,” Enoch Emery said, pushing in by the policeman. “He ain’t been here but only two days. I’ll look after him.”
“How long you been here?” the cop asked.
“I was born and raised here,” Enoch said. “This is my ole home town. I’ll take care of him for you. Hey wait!” he yelled at Haze. “Wait on me!” He pushed out the crowd and caught up with him. “I reckon I saved you that time,” he said.
“I’m obliged,” Haze said.
“It wasn’t nothing,” Enoch said. “Why don’t we go in Walgreen’s and get us a soda? Ain’t no nightclubs open this early.”
“I don’t like no drugstores,” Haze said. “Goodby.”
“That’s all right,” Enoch said. “I reckon I’ll go along and keep you company for a while.” He looked up ahead at the couple and said, “I sho wouldn’t want to get messed up with no hicks this time of night, particularly the Jesus kind. I done had enough of them myself. Thisyer woman that traded me from my daddy didn’t do nothing but pray. Me and daddy, we moved around with a sawmill where we worked and it set up outside Boonville one summer and here come thisyer woman.” He caught hold of Haze’s coat. “Only objection I got to Taulkinham is there’s too many people on the street,” he said confidentially, “look like they ain’t satisfied until they knock you down—well, here she come and I reckon she took a fancy to me. I was twelve year old and I could sing some hymns good I learnt off a nigger. So here she comes taking a fancy to me and traded me off my daddy and took me to Boonville to live with her. She had a brick house but it was Jesus all day lang.” While he was talking he was looking up at Haze, studying his face. All of a sudden he bumped into a little man lost in a pair of faded overalls. “Whyn’t you look where you going?” he growled.
The little man stopped short and raised his arm in a vicious gesture and a mean dog look came on his face. “Who you tellin what?” he snarled.
“You see,” Enoch said, jumping to catch up with Haze, “all they want to do is knock you down. I ain’t never been to such a unfriendly place before. Even with that woman. I stayed with her for two months in that house of hers,” he went on, “and then come fall she sent me to the Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy and I thought that sho was gonna be some relief. This woman was hard to get along with—she wasn’t old, I reckon she was forty year old—but she sho was ugly. She had the seyer brown glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull. I thought it was gonna be some certain relief to get to that Ac. idemv. I had run away oncet on her and she got me back and come to find out she had papers on me and she could send me to the penitentiary if I didn’t stay with her so I sho was glad to get to theter Academy. You ever been to a academy?”
Haze didn’t seem to hear the question. He still held his eye on the blind man in the next block.
“Well, it won’t no relief,” Enoch said. “Good Jesus, it won’t no relief. I run away from there after four weeks and durn if she didn’t get me back and brought me to that house of hers again. I got out though.” He waited a minute. “You want to know how?”
After a second he said, “I scared hell out of that woman, that’s how. I studied on it and studied on it. I even prayed. I said, ‘Jesus, show me the way to get out of here without killing thisyer woman and getting sent to the penitentiary.’ And durn if He didn’t. I got up one morning at just daylight and I went in her room without my pants on and pulled the sheet off her and giver a heart attackt. Then I went back to my daddy and we ain’t seen hide of her since.
“Your jaw just crawls,” he observed, watching the side of Haze’s face. “You don’t never laugh. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wasn’t a real wealthy man.”
Haze turned down a side street. The blind man and the girl were Oil the corner a block ahead.
“Well, I reckon we gonna ketch up with em after all,” Enoch said. “Ain’t that girl ugly, though? You seen them shoes she has on? Men’s shoes, looks like. You know many people here?”
“No,” Haze said.
“You ain’t gonna know none neither. This is one more hard place to make friends in. I been here two months and I don’t know nobody, look like all they want to do is knock you down. I reckon you got a right heap of money,” he said. “I ain’t got none. Had, I’d sho know what to do with it.” The man and the girl stopped on the corner and turned up the left side of the street. “We catching up,” he said. “I bet we’ll be at some meeting singing hymns with her and her daddy if we don’t watch out.”
Up in the next block there was a large building with columns and a dome. The blind man and the child were going toward it. There was a car parked in every space around the building and on the other side the street and up and down the streets near it. “That ain’t no picture show,” Enoch said. The blind man and the girl turned up the steps to the building. The steps went all the way across the front, and on either side there were stone lions sitting on pedestals. “Ain’t no church,” Enoch said. Haze stopped at the steps. He looked as if he were trying to settle his face into an expression. He pulled the black hat forward at a nasty angle and started toward the two, who had sat down in the corner by one of the lions.
As they came nearer the blind man leaned forward as if he were listening to the footsteps, then he stood up, holding a tract out in his hand.
“Sit down,” the child said in a loud voice. “It ain’t nobody but them two boys.”
“Nobody but us,” Enoch Emery said. “Me and him been follerin you all about a mile.”
“I knew somebody was following me,” the blind man said. “Sit down.”
“They ain’t here for nothing but to make fun,” the child said. She looked as if she smelled something bad. The blind man was feeling out to touch them. Haze stood just out of reach of his hands, squinting at him as if he were trying to see the empty eye sockets under the green glasses.
“It ain’t me, it’s him,” Enoch said. “He’s been running after yawl ever since back yonder by them potato peelers. We bought one of em.”
“I knew somebody was following me!” the blind man said. “I felt it all the way back yonder.”
“I ain’t followed you,” Haze said. He felt the peeler box in his hand and looked at the girl. The black knitted cap came down almost to her eyes. She looked as if she might be thirteen or fourteen years old. “I ain’t followed you nowhere,” he said sourly. “I followed her.” He stuck the peeler box out at her.
She jumped back and looked as if she were going to swallow her face. “I don’t want that thing,” she said. “What you think I want with that thing? Take it. It ain’t mine. I don’t want it!”
“I take it with thanks for her,” the blind man said. “Put it in your sack,” he said to her.
Haze thrust the peeler at her again, but he was still looking at the blind man.
“I won’t have it,” she muttered.
“Take it like I told you,” the blind man said shortly.
After a second she took it and shoved it in the sack where the tracts were. “It ain’t mine,” she said. “I don’t want none of it. I got it but it ain’t mine.”
“She thanks you for it,” the blind man said. “I knew somebody was following me.”
“I ain’t followed you nowhere,” Haze said. “I followed her to say I ain’t beholden for none of her fast eye like she gave me back yonder.” He didn’t look at her, he looked at the blind man.
“What do you mean?” she shouted. “I never gave you no fast eye. I only watch you tearing up that tract. He tore it up in little pieces,” she said, pushing the blind man’s shoulder. “He tore it up and sprinkled it over the ground like salt and wiped his hands on his pants.”
“He followed me,” the blind man said. “Wouldn’t anybody follow you. I can hear the urge for Jesus in his voice.”
“Jesus,” Haze muttered, “my Jesus.” He sat down by the girl’s leg. His head was at her knee and he set his hand on the step next to her foot. She had on men’s shoes and black cotton stockings. The shoes were laced up tight and tied in precise bows. She moved herself away roughly and sat down behind the blind man.
“Listen at his cursing,” she said in a low tone. “He never followed you.”
“Listen,” the blind man said, “you can’t run away from Jesus. Jesus is a fact. If who you’re looking for is Jesus, the sound of it will be in your voice.”
“I don’t hear nothing in his voice,” Enoch Emery said. “I know a whole heap about Jesus because I attended this here Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy that a woman sent me to. If it was anything about Jesus in his voice I could certainly hear it.” He had got up onto the lion’s back and he was sitting there sideways crosslegged.
The blind man reached out again and his hands suddenly covered Haze’s face. For a second Haze didn’t move or make any sound. Then he knocked the hands off. “Quit it,” he said in a faint voice. “You don’t know nothing about me.”
“You got a secret need,” the blind man said. “Them that know Jesus once can’t escape Him in the end.”
“I ain’t never known Him,” Haze said.
“You got a least knowledge,” the blind man said. “That’s enough. You know His name and you’re marked. If Jesus has marked you there ain’t nothing you can do about it. Them that have knowledge can’t swap it for ignorance.” He was leaning forward but in the wrong direction so that he appeared to be talking to the step below Haze’s foot. Haze sat leaning backward with the black hat tilted forward over his face.
“My daddy looks just like Jesus,” Enoch said from the lion’s back. “His hair hangs to his shoulders. Only difference is he’s got a scar acrost his chin. I ain’t never seen who my mother is.”
“You’re marked with knowledge,” the blind man said. “You know what sin is and only them that know what it is can commit it. I knew all the time we were walking here somebody was following me,” he said. “You couldn’t have followed her. Wouldn’t anybody follow her. I could feel there was somebody near with an urge for Jesus.”
“There ain’t nothing for your pain but Jesus,” the girl said suddenly. She leaned forward and stuck her arm out with her finger pointed at Haze’s shoulder, but he spat down the steps and didn’t look at her. “Listen,” she said in a louder voice, “this here man and woman killed this little baby. It was her own child but it was ugly and she never give it any love. This child had Jesus and this woman didn’t have nothing but good looks and a man she was living in Sin with. She sent the child away and it come back and she sent it away again and it come back again and ever time she sent it away it come back to where her and this man was living in Sin. They strangled it with a silk stock ng and hung it up in the chimney. It didn’t give her any peace after that, though. Everything she looked at was that child. Jesus made it beautiful to haunt her. She couldn’t lie with that man without she saw it, staring through the chimney at her, shining through the brick in the middle of the night.” She moved her feet around so that just the tips of them stuck out from her skirt which she had pulled tight around her legs. “She didn’t have nothing but good looks,” she said in a loud fast voice. “That ain’t enough. No sirree.”
“My Jesus,” Haze said.
“It ain’t enough,” she repeated.
“I hear them scraping their feet inside there,” the blind man said.
“Get out the tracts, they’re fixing to come out.”
“What we gonna do?” Enoch asked. “What’s inside theter building?”
“A program letting out,” the blind man said. The child took the tracts out the gunny sack and gave him two bunches of them, tied with a string. “You and Enoch Emery go over on that side and give out,” he said to her. “Me and this boy’ll stay over here.”
“He don’t have no business touching them,” she said. “He don’t want to do nothing but shred them up.”
“Go like I told you,” the blind man said.
She stood there a second, scowling. Then she said, “You come on if you’re coming,” to Enoch Emery and Enoch jumped off the lion and followed her over to the other side.
The blind man was reaching forward. Haze ducked to the side but the blind man was next to him on the step with his hand clamped around his arm. He leaned forward so that he was facing Haze’s knee and he said in a fast whisper, “You followed me here because you’re in Sin but you can be a testament to the Lord. Repent! Go to the head of the stairs and renounce your sins and distribute these tracts to the people,” and he thrust the stack of pamphlets into Haze’s hand.
Haze jerked his arm away but he only pulled the blind man nearer. “Listen,” he said, “I’m as clean as you are.”
“Fornication,” the blind man said.
“That ain’t nothing but a word,” Haze said. “If I was in Sin I was in it before I ever committed any. Ain’t no change come in me.” He was trying to pry the fingers off from around his arm but the blind man kept wrapping them tighter. “I don’t believe in Sin,” he said. “Take your hand off me.”
“You do,” the blind man said, “you’re marked.”
“I ain’t marked,” Haze said, “I’m free.”
“You’re marked free,” the blind man said. “Jesus loves you and you can’t escape his mark. Go to the head of the stairs and…”
Haze jerked his arm free and jumped up. “I’ll take them up there and throw them over into the bushes,” he said. “You be looking! See can you see.”
“I can see more than you!” the blind man shouted. “You got eyes and see not, ears and hear not, but Jesus’ll make you see!”
“You be watching if you can see!” Haze said, and started running up the steps. People were already coming out the auditorium doors and some were halfway down the steps. He pushed through them with his elbows out like sharp wings and when he got to the top, a new surge of them pushed him back almost to where he had started up. He fought through them again until somebody hollered, “Make room for this idiot!” and people got out of his way. He rushed to the top and pushed his way over to the side and stood there, glaring and panting.
“I never followed him,” he said aloud. “I wouldn’t follow a blind fool like that. My Jesus.” He stood against the building, holding the stack of leaflets by the string. A fat man stopped near him to light a cigar, and Haze pushed his shoulder. “Look down yonder,” he said. “See that blind man down there, he’s giving out tracts. Jesus. You ought to see him and he’s got this here ugly child dressed up in woman’s clothes, giving them out too. My Jesus.”
“There’s always fanatics,” the fat man said, moving on.
“My Jesus,” Haze said. He leaned forward near an old woman with orange hair and a collar of red wooden beads. “You better get on the other side, lady,” he said. “There’s a fool down there giving out tracts.” The crowd behind the old woman pushed her on, but she looked at him for an instant with two bright flea eyes. He started toward her through the people but she was already too far away, and he pushed back to where he had been standing against the wall. “Sweet Jesus Christ crucified,” he said, and felt something turn in his chest. The crowd was moving fast. It was like a big spread ravelling and the separate threads disappeared down the dark streets until there was nothing left of it and he was standing on the porch of the auditorium by himself. The tracts were speckled all over the steps and on the sidewalk and out into the street. The blind man was standing down on the first step, bent over, feeling for the crumpled pamphlets scattered around him. Enoch Emery was over on the other side, standing on the lion’s head and trying to balance himself, and the child was picking up the pamphlets that were not too crushed to use again and putting them back in the gunny sack.
I don’t need no Jesus, Haze said. I don’t need no Jesus. I got Leora Watts.
He ran down the steps to where the blind man was, and stopped.
He stood there for a second just out of reach of his hands which had begun to grope forward, hunting the sound of his step, and then he started across the street. He was on the other side before the voice pierced after him. He turned and saw the blind man standing in the middle of the street, shouting, “Shrike! Shrike! My name is Asa Shrike when you want me!” A car had to swerve to the side to keep from hitting him.
Haze drew his head down nearer his hunched shoulders and went on quickly. He didn’t look back until he heard the footsteps coming behind him.
“Now that we got shut of them,” Enoch Emery panted, “whyn’t we go sommer and have us some fun?”
“Listen,” Haze said roughly, “I got business of my own. I seen all of you I want.” He began walking very fast.
Enoch kept skipping steps to keep up. “I been here two months,” he said, “and I don’t know nobody. People ain’t friendly here. I got me a room and there ain’t never nobody in it but me. My daddy said I had to come. I wouldn’t never have come but he made me. I think I seen you sommers before. You ain’t from Stockwell, are you?”
“No.”
“Melsy?”
“No.”
“Sawmill set up there oncet,” Enoch said. “Look like you had a kind of familer face.”
They walked on without saying anything until they got on the main street again. It was almost deserted. “Goodby,” Haze said and quickened his walk again.
“I’m going thisaway too,” Enoch said in a sullen voice. On the left there was a movie house where the electric bill was being changed. “We hadn’t got tied up with them hicks, we could have gone to a show,” he muttered. He strode along at Haze’s elbow, talking in a half mumble, half whine. Once he caught at his sleeve to slow him down and Haze jerked it away. “He made me come,” he said in a cracked voice. Haze looked at him and saw he was crying, his face seamed and wet and a purple-pink color. “I ain’t but eighteen year,” he cried, “and he made me come and I don’t know nobody, nobody here’ll have nothing to do with nobody else. They ain’t friendly. He done gone off with a woman and made me come but she ain’t gonna stay for long, he’s gonna beat hell out of her before she gets herself stuck to a chair. You the first familer face I seen in two months, I seen you sommers before. I know I seen you sommers before.”
Haze looked straight ahead with his face set hard, and Enoch kept up the half mumble, half blubber. They passed a church and a hotel and an antique shop and turned up a street full of brick houses, each alike in the darkness.
“If you want you a woman you don’t have to be follerin nothing looked like her,” Enoch said. “I heard about where there’s a house full of two-dollar ones. Whyn’t we go have us some fun? I could pay you back next week.”
“Look,” Haze said, “I’m going where I stay—two doors from here. I got a woman. I got a woman, you understand? I don’t need to go with you.”
“I could pay you back next week,” Enoch said. “I work at the city zoo. I guard a gate and I get paid ever week.”
“Get away from me,” Haze said.
“People ain’t friendly here. You ain’t from here and you ain’t friendly neither.”
Haze didn’t answer him. He went on with his neck drawn close to his shoulder blades as if he were cold.
“You don’t know nobody neither,” Enoch said. “You ain’t got no woman or nothing to do. I knew when I first seen you you didn’t have nobody or nothing. I seen you and I knew it.”
“This is where I live,” Haze said, and he turned up the walk of the house without looking back at Enoch.
Enoch stopped. “Yeah,” he cried, “oh yeah,” and he ran his sleeve under his nose to stop the snivel. “Yeah,” he cried. “Go on where you gain but looker here.” He slapped at his pocket and ran up and caught Haze’s sleeve and rattled the peeler box at him. “She give me this. She give it to me and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. She invited me to come to see them and not you and it was you follerin them.” His eyes glinted through his tears and his face stretched in an evil crooked grin.
Haze’s mouth jerked but he didn’t say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the middle of the steps, and then he raised his arm and hurled the stack of tracts he had been carrying. It hit Enoch in the chest and knocked his mouth open. He stood looking, with his mouth hanging open, at where it had hit his front, and then he turned and tore off down the street; and Haze went into the house.
The night before was the first time he had slept with Leora Watts or any woman, and he had not been very successful with her. When he finished, he was like something washed ashore on her, and she had made obscene comments about him, which he remembered gradually during the day. He was uneasy in the thought of going to her again. He didn’t know what she would say when she opened the door and saw him there.
When she opened the door and saw him there, she said, “Ha ha.” She was a big blonde woman with a green nightgown on. “What do YOU want?” she said.
He put his face into what he thought was an all-knowing expression but it was only stretched a little on one side. The black wool hat sat on his head squarely. Leora left the door open and went back to the bed. He came in with his hat on and when it knocked the sacked electric lightbulb, he took it off. Leora rested her face on her hand and watched him. He began to move around the room examining this and that. His throat got dryer and his heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage. He sat down on the edge of her bed, with his hat in his hand.
Leora’s eyes had narrowed some and her mouth had widened and got thin as a knife blade. “That Jesus-seeing hat!” she said. She sat up and pulled her nightgown from under her and took it off. She reached for his hat and put it on her head and sat with her hands on her hips, watching him. Haze stared blank-faced for a minute, then he made three quick noises that were laughs. He jumped for the electric light cord and undressed in the dark.
Once when he was small, his father took him and his sister, Ruby, to a carnival that stopped in Melsy. There was one tent that cost more money, a little off to the side. A dried-up man with a horn voice was barking it. He never said what was inside. He said it was so SINsational that it would cost any man wanted to see it thirtyfive cents, and it was so EXclusive, only fifteen could get in at a time. His father sent him and Ruby to a tent where two monkeys danced, and then he made for it, moving shuttle-faced and close to the walls of things, like he moved. Haze left the monkeys and followed him, but he didn’t have thirtyfive cents.
He asked the barker what was inside.
“Beat it,” the man said, “there ain’t no pop and there ain’t no monkeys.”
“I already seen them,” he said.
“That’s fine,” the man said, “beat it.”
“I got fifteen cents,” he said. “Whyn’t you lemme in and I could see half of it.” It’s something about a privy, he was thinking. It’s some men in a privy. Then he thought, maybe it’s a man and a woman in a privy. She wouldn’t want me in there. “I got fifteen cents,” he said.
“It’s more than half over,” the man said, fanning with his straw hat. “You run along.”
“That’ll be fifteen cents worth then,” Haze said.
“Scram,” the man said.
“Is it a nigger?” Haze asked. “Are they doing something to a nigger?”
The man leaned off his platform and his dried-up face drew into a glare. “Where’d you get that idear?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Haze said.
“How old are you?” the man asked.
“Twelve,” Haze said. He was ten.
“Gimme that fifteen cents,” the man said, “and get in there.”
He slid the money on the platform and scrambled to get in before it was over. He went through the flap of the tent and inside there was another tent and he went through that. His face was hot through to the back of his head. All he could see were the backs of the men. He climbed up on a bench and looked over their heads. They were looking down into a lowered place where something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman. She was fat and she had a face like an ordinary woman except there was a mole on the corner of her lip, that moved when she grinned, and one on her side, that was moving too. Haze’s head became so heavy he couldn’t turn it away from her.
“Had one of themther built in ever casket,” his father, up toward the front, said, “be a heap ready to go sooner.”
He recognized the voice without looking. He fell down off the bench and scrambled out the tent. He crawled out under the side of the outside one because he didn’t want to pass the barker. He got in the back of a truck and sat down in the far corner of it. The carnival was making a tin roar outside.
His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when he got home. She wore black all the time and her dresses were longer than other women’s. She was standing there straight, looking at him. He slid behind a tree and got out of her view, but in a few minutes he could feel her watching him through the tree. He saw the lowered place and the casket again and a thin woman in the casket who was too long for it. Her head stuck up at one end and her knees were raised to make her fit. She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head, and she was twisting and trying to cover herself while the men looked down. He stood flat against the tree, dry-throated. She left the wash pot and come toward him with a stick. She said, “What you seen?”
“What you seen?” she said.
“What you seen?” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem you,” she said.
“I never ast Him,” he muttered.
She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shutmouthed, and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. In a minute she threw the stick away from her and went back to the wash pot, shutmouthed.
The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He never wore them except for revivals and in winter. He took them out of the box and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the woods what he knew to be a mile, until he came to a creek, and then he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand. He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he would have taken it for a sign. After a while he drew his feet out the sand and let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them and he walked a half mile back before he took them off.
The Heart of the Park (1949)
ENOCH EMERY knew when he woke up that today the person he could show it to was going to come. He knew by his blood. He had wise blood like his daddy.
At two o’clock that afternoon, he greeted the second-shift gate guard. “You ain’t but only fifteen minutes late,” he said irritably. “But I stayed. I could of went on but I stayed.” He wore a green uniform with yellow piping on the neck and sleeves and a yellow stripe down the outside of each leg. The second-shift guard, a boy with a jutting shale-textured face and a toothpick in his mouth, wore the same. The gate they were standing by was made of iron bars and the concrete arch that held it was fashioned to look like two trees; branches curved to form the top of it where twisted letters said, CITY FOREST PARK. The second-shift guard leaned against one of the trunks and began prodding between his teeth with the pick.
“Ever day,” Enoch complained; “look like ever day I lose fifteen good minutes standing here waiting on you.”
Every day when he got off duty, he went into the park and every day when he went in, he did the same things. He went first to the swimming pool. He was afraid of the water but he liked to sit up on the bank above it if there were any women in the pool, and watch them. There was one woman who came every Monday who wore a bathing suit that was split on each hip. At first he thought she didn’t know it, and instead of watching openly on the bank, he had crawled into some bushes, snickering to himself and had watched from there. There had been no one else in the pool—the crowds didn’t come until four o’clock—to tell her about the split and she had splashed around in the water and then lain up on the edge of the pool asleep for almost an hour, all the time without suspecting there was somebody in the bushes looking at where she came out of the suit. Then on another day when he stopped a little later, he saw three women, all with their suits split, the pool full of people, and nobody paying them any mind. That was how the city was—always surprising him. He visited a whore every time he had two dollars to spare but he was continually being shocked by the looseness he saw in the open. He crawled into the bushes out of a sense of propriety. Very often the women would pull the suit straps down off their shoulders and lie stretched out.
The park was the heart of the city. He had come to the city—with a knowing in his blood—he had established himself at the heart of it. Every day he looked at the heart of it; every day; and he was so stunned and awed and overwhelmed that just to think about it made him sweat. There was something, in the center of the park, that he had discovered. It was a mystery, although it was right there in a glass case for everybody to see and there was a typewritten card telling all about it right there. But there was something the card couldn’t say and what it couldn’t say was inside him, a terrible knowledge without any words to it, a terrible knowledge like a big nerve growing inside him. He could not show the mystery to just anybody; but he had to show it to somebody. Who he had to show it to was a special person. This person could not be from the city but he didn’t know why. He knew he would know him when he saw him and he knew that he would have to see him soon or the nerve inside him would grow so big that he would be forced to rob a bank or jump on a woman or drive a stolen car into the side of a building. His blood all morning had been saying the person would come today.
He left the second-shift guard and approached the pool from a discreet footpath that led behind the ladies’ end of the bath house to a small clearing where the entire pool could be seen at once. There was nobody in it—the water was bottle-green and motionless—but he saw, coming up the other side and heading for the bath house, the woman with the two little boys. She came every other day or so and brought the two children. She would go in the water with them and swim down the pool and then she would lie up on the side in the sun. She had a stained white bathing suit that fit her like a sack, and Enoch had watched her with pleasure on several occasions. He moved from the clearing up a slope to some abelia bushes. There was a nice tunnel under them and he crawled into it until he came to a slightly wider place where he was accustomed to sit. He settled himself and adjusted the abelia so that he could see through it properly. His face was always very red in the bushes. Anyone who parted the abelia sprigs at just that place would think he saw a devil and would fall down the slope and into the poo!. The woman and the two little boys entered the bath house. Enoch never wept immediately to the dark secret center of the park. That was the peak of the afternoon. The other things he did built up to it and they had become very formal and necessary. When he left the bushes, he would go to the FROSTY BOTTLE, a hot-dog stand in the shape of an Orange Crush with frost painted in blue around the top of it. Here he would have a chocolate malted milkshake and would make a few suggestive remarks to the waitress whom he believed to be secretly in love with him. After that he would go to see the animals. They were in a long set of steel cages like Alcatraz Penitentiary in the movies. The cages were electrically heated in the winter and air-conditioned in the summer and there were six men hired to wait on the animals and feed them T-bone steaks. The animals didn’t do anything but lie around. Enoch watched them every day, full of awe and hate. Then he went there.
The two little boys ran out the bath house and dove into the water, and simultaneously a grating noise issued from the driveway on the other side of the pool. Enoch’s head pierced out the bushes. He saw a high rat-colored car passing, which sounded as if its motor were dragging out the back. The car passed and he could hear it rattle around the turn in the drive-way. He listened carefully, trying to hear if it would stop. The noise receded and then gradually grew louder. The car passed again. Enoch saw this time that there was only one person in it, a man. The sound of it died away again and then grew louder. The car carne around a third time and stopped almost directly opposite Enoch across the pool. The man in the car looked out the window and down the grass slope to the water where the two little boys were splashing and screaming. Enoch’s head was as far out the bushes as it could come and he was squinting. The door by the man was tied on with a rope. The man got out the other door and walked in front of the car and came halfway down the slope to the pool. He stood there a minute as if he were looking for somebody and then he sat down stiffly on the grass. He had on a suit that looked as if it had glare in it. He sat with his knees drawn up. “Well, I’ll be dog,” Enoch said. “Well, I’ll be dog.”
He began crawling out of the bushes immediately, his heart moving so fast it was like one of those motorcycles at fairs that the fellow drives around the walls of a pit. He even remembered the man’s name—Mr. Hazel Weaver. In a second he appeared on all fours at the end of the abelia and looked across the pool. The blue figure was still sitting there in the same position. He had the look of being held there, like by an invisible hand, like if the hand lifted up, the figure would spring across the pool in one leap without the expression on his face changing once.
The woman came out the bath house and went straight to the diving board. She spread her arms out and began to bounce, making a big heavy flapping sound with the board. Then suddenly she swirled backwards and disappeared below the water. Mr. Hazel Weaver’s head turned very slowly, following her down the pool.
Enoch got up and went down the path behind the bath house. He came stealthily out on the other side and started walking toward Haze. He stayed on the top of the slope, moving softly in the grass just off the sidewalk, and making no noise. When he was directly behind him, he sat down on the edge of the sidewalk. If his arms had been ten feet long, he could have put his hands on Haze’s shoulders. He studied him quietly.
The woman was climbing out the pool, chinning herself up on the side. First her face appeared, long and cadaverous, with a bandage-like bathing cap coming down almost to her eyes, and sharp teeth protruding from her mouth. Then she rose on her hands until a large foot and leg came up from behind her and another on the other side and she was out, squatting there, panting. She stood up loosely and shook herself, and stamped in the water dripping off her. She was facing them and she grinned. Enoch could see a part of Hazel Weaver’s face watching the woman. It didn’t grin in return but it kept on watching her as she padded over to a spot of sun almost directly under where they were sitting. Enoch had to move a little to see.
The woman sat down in the spot of sun and took off her bathing cap. Her hair was short and matted and all sorts of colors, from deep rust to a polluted lemon yellow. She shook her head and then she looked up at Hazel Weaver again, grinning through her pointed teeth. She stretched herself out in the spot of sun, raising her knees and settling her backbone down against the concrete. The two little boys, at the other end of the water, were knocking each other’s heads against the side of the pool. She settled herself until she was flat against the concrete and then she reached up and pulled the bathing suit straps off her shoulders.
“King Jesus!” Enoch whispered and before he could get his eyes off the woman, Haze Weaver had sprung up and was almost to his car. The woman was sitting straight up with the suit half off her in front, and Enoch was looking both ways at once. He wrenched his attention loose from the woman and darted after Hazel Weaver.
“Wait on me!” he shouted and waved his arms in front of the car which was already rattling and starting to go. Hazel Weaver cut off the motor. His face behind the windshield was sour and froglike; it looked like it had a shout closed up in it, it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where there is somebody tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth.
“Well,” Enoch said, “I declare if it ain’t Hazel Weaver. How are you, Hazel?”
“The guard said I’d find you at the swimming pool,” Hazel Weaver said. “He said you hid in the bushes and watched the swimming.”
Enoch blushed. “I allus have admired swimming,” he said. Then he stuck his head farther through the winelow. “You were looking for me?” he exclaimed.
“Those people,” Haze said, “those people named Moats—did she tell you where they lived?”
Enoch didn’t seem to hear. “You came out here special to see me?” he said.
“Asa and Sabbath Moats—she gave you the peeler. Did she tell you where they lived?”
Enoch eased his head out the car. He opened the door and climbed in beside Haze. For a minute he only looked at him, wetting his lips. Then he whispered, “I got to show you something.”
“I’m looking for those people,” Haze said. “I got to see that man. Did she tell you where they live?”
“I got to show you this thing,” Enoch said. “I got to show it to you, here, this afternoon. I got to.” He gripped Hazel Weaver’s arm and Hazel Weaver shook him off.
“Did she tell you where they live?” he said again.
Enoch kept wetting his lips. They were pale except for his fever blister, which was purple. “Sho,” he said. “Ain’t she invited me to come see her and bring my harp? I got to show you this thing,” he said, “then I’ll tell you.”
“What thing?” Haze muttered.
“This thing I got to show you,” Enoch said. “Drive straight on ahead and I’ll tell you where to stop.”
“I don’t want to see anything of yours,” Hazel Weaver said. “I got to have that address.”
“I won’t be able to remember it unless you come,” Enoch said. He didn’t look at Hazel Weaver. He looked out the window. In a minute the car started. Enoch’s blood was beating fast. He knew he had to go to the FROSTY BOTTLE and the zoo before there, and he foresaw a terrible struggle with Hazel Weaver. He would have to get him there, even if he had to hit him over the head with a rock, and carry him on his back right up to it.
Enoch’s brain was divided into two parts. The part in communication with his blood did the figuring but it never said anything in words. The other part was stocked up with all kinds of words and phrases. While the first part was figuring how to get Hazel Weaver through the FROSTY BOTTLE and the zoo, the second inquired, “Where’d you git thisyer fine car? You ought to paint you some signs on the outside it, like ‘step-in, baby’—I seen one with that on it, then I seen another with…”
Hazel Weaver’s face might have been cut out the side of a rock.
“My daddy once owned a yeller Ford automobile he won on a ticket,” Enoch murmured. “It had a roll-up top and two arials and a squirril tail all come with it. He swapped it off. Stop here! Stop here!” he yelled—they were passing the FROSTY BOTTLE.
“Where is it?” Hazel Weaver said as soon as they were inside. They were in a dark room with a counter across the back of it and brown stools like toadstools in front of the counter. On the wall facing the door there was a large advertisement for ice cream, showing a cow dressed like a housewife.
“It ain’t here,” Enoch said. “We have to stop here on the way and get something to eat. What you want?”
“Nothing,” Haze muttered. He stood stiffly in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets and his neck drawn down inside his collar.
“Well, sit down,” Enoch said. “I have to have a little drink.”
Something stirred behind the counter and a woman with bobbed hair like a man’s got up from a chair where she had been reading the newspaper, and came forward. She looked sourly at Enoch. She had on a once-white uniform clotted with brown stains. “What you want?” she said in a loud voice, leaning close to his ear as if he were deaf. She had a man’s face and big muscled arms.
“I want a chocolate malted milkshake, baby girl,” Enoch said softly. “I want a lot of ice cream in it.”
She turned fiercely from him and glared at Haze.
“He says he don’t want nothing but to sit down and look at you for a while,” Enoch said. “He ain’t hungry but for just to see you.”
Haze looked woodenly at the woman and she turned her back on him and began mixing the milkshake. He sat down on the last stool in the row and started cracking his knuckles.
Enoch watched him carefully. “I reckon you done changed some,” he murmured after a few minutes.
Haze’s neck jerked around and he started forward. “Give me those people’s address. Right now,” he said.
It came to Enoch in an instant. The police. His face was suddenly suffused with secret knowledge. “I reckon you ain’t as uppity as you used to be,” he said. “I reckon maybe,” he said, “you ain’t got so much cause now as you had then.” Stole theter automobile, he thought.
Hazel Weaver sat back down. There was no expression on his face but inside his sour wet eyes, something moved. He turned away from Enoch.
“How come you jumped up so fast down yonder at the pool?” Enoch asked. The woman turned around to him with the malted milk in her hand. “Of course,” he said evilly, “I wouldn’t have had no truck with a ugly dish like that neither.”
The woman thumped the malted milk on the counter in front of him. “Fifteen cents,” she roared.
“You’re worth more than that, baby girl,” Enoch said. He snickered and began gassing his malted milk through the straw.
The woman strode over to where Haze was. “What do you come in here with a son of a bitch like that for?” she shouted. “A nice quiet boy like you to come in here with a son of a bitch. You ought to mind the company you keep.” Her name was Maude and she drank whiskey all day from a fruit jar under the counter. “Jesus,” she said, wiping her hand under her nose. She sat down in a straight chair in front of Haze but facing Enoch, and folded her arms across her chest. “Ever day,” she said to Haze, looking at Enoch, “ever day that son of a bitch comes in here.”
Enoch was thinking about the animals. They had to go next to the animals. He hated them; just thinking about them made his face turn a chocolate purple color as if the malted milk were rising in his head.
“You’re a nice boy,” she said, “I can see you got a clean nose, well keep it clean, don’t go messin with a son of a bitch like that yonder. I always know a clean boy when I see one.” She was shouting at Enoch, but Enoch watched Hazel Weaver. It was like something inside Hazel Weaver was winding up, although he didn’t move on the outside, not even his hands. He just looked pressed down in that blue suit, like inside it, the thing winding was getting tighter and tighter. Enoch’s blood told him to hurry He raced the milkshake up the straw.
“Yes sir,” she said, “there ain’t anything sweeter than a clean boy. God for my witness. And I know a clean one when I see him and I know a son a bitch when I see him and there’s a lot of difference and that pus-marked bastard zlurping through that straw is a goddammed son a bitch and you a clean boy had better mind how you keep him company. I know a clean boy when I see one.”
Enoch screeched in the bottom of his glass. He fished fifteen cents from his pocket and laid it on the counter and got up. But Hazel Weaver was already up; he was leaning over the counter toward the woman. She didn’t see him right away because she was looking at Enoch. He leaned on his hands over the counter until his face was just a foot from hers. She turned around and stared at him.
“Come on,” Enoch started, “we don’t have no time to be sassing around with her. I got to show you this right away, I got…”
“I ain’t clean,” Haze said.
It was not until he said it again that Enoch heard the words.
“I ain’t clean,” he said again, without any expression on his face or in his voice, just looking at the woman as if he were looking at a piece of wood.
She stared at him, startled and then outraged. “What do you think I care!” she screamed. “Why should I give a goddamm what you are?”
“Come on,” Enoch whined, “come on or I won’t tell you where them people live.” He caught Haze’s arm and pulled him back from the counter and toward the door.
“You bastard!” the woman screamed, “what do you think I care about any of you filthy boys?”
Hazel Weaver pushed the door open quickly and went out. He got back in his car, and Enoch jumped in behind him. “Okay,” Enoch said, “drive straight on ahead down this road.”
“What do you want for telling me?” Haze said. “I’m not staying here. I have to go. I can’t stay here any longer.”
Enoch shuddered. He began wetting his lips. “I got to show it to you,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t show it to nobody but you. I had a sign it was you when I seen you drive up at the pool. I knew all morning somebody was gonna come and then when I saw you at the pool, I had thisyer sign.”
“I don’t care about your signs,” Haze said.
“I go to see it ever day,” Enoch said. “I go ever day but I ain’t ever been able to take nobody else with me. I had to wait on the sign. I’ll tell you them people’s address just as soon as you see it. You got to see it,” he said. “When you see it, something’s going to happen.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Haze said.
He started the car again and Enoch sat forward on the seat. “Them animals,” he muttered. “We got to walk by them first. It won’t take long for that. It won’t take a minute.” He saw the animals waiting evil-eyed for him, ready to throw him off time. He thought what if the police were screaming out here now with sirens and squad cars and they got to Hazel Weaver just before he showed it to him.
“I got to see those people,” Haze said.
“Stop here! Stop here!” Enoch cried.
There was a long shining row of steel cages over to the left and behind the bars, black figures were sitting or pacing. “Get out,” Enoch said. “This won’t take one second.”
Haze got out. Then he stopped. “I got to see those people,” he said.
“Okay, okay, come on,” Enoch whined.
“I don’t believe you know the address.”
“I do! I do!” Enoch cried. “It begins with a two, now come on!” He pulled Haze toward the cages. There were two black bears in the first one. They were sitting facing each other like two matrons having tea, their faces polite and self-absorbed. “They don’t do nothing but sit there all day and stink,” Enoch said. “A man comes and washes theseyer cages out ever morning with a hose and it stinks just as much as if he’d left it.” Every animal there had a personal haughty hatred for him like society people have for climbers. He went on past two more cages of bears, not even looking at them, and then he stopped at the next cage where there were two yellow-eyed wolves nosing around the edges of the concrete. “Hyenas,” he said. “I ain’t got no use for hyenas.” He leaned closer and spit into the cage, hitting one of the wolves on the leg. It shuttled to one side, giving him a slanted evil look. For a second he forgot Hazel Weaver. Then he looked back quickly to make sure he was still there. He was right behind him. He was not looking at the animals. Thinking about them police, Enoch thought. He said, “Come on, we don’t have to look at all theseyer monkeys that come next.” Usually he stopped at every cage and made an obscene comment aloud to himself, but today the animals were only a form he had to get through. He hurried past the cages of monkeys, looking back two or three times to make sure Hazel Weaver was behind him. At the last of the monkey cages, he stopped as if he couldn’t help himself.
“Look at that ape,” he said, glaring. The animal had its back to him, gray except for a small pink seat. “If I had a ass like that,” he said prudishly, “I’d sit on it. I wouldn’t be exposing it to all these people come to this park. Come on, we don’t have to look at theseyer birds that come next.” He ran past the cages of birds and then he was at the end of the zoo. “Now we don’t need the car,” he said, going on ahead, “we’ll go right down that hill yonder through them trees.” He stopped and saw that Hazel Weaver instead of being behind him had stopped at the last cage for birds. “Oh Jesus,” he groaned. He stood and waved his arms wildly and shouted, “Come on!” but Haze didn’t move from where he was looking into the cage.
Enoch ran back to him and grabbed him by tic arm but Haze pushed him off absently and kept on looking in the cage. It was empty. Enoch stared. “It’s empty!” he shouted. “What do you have to look in that all’ empty cage for? You come on,” He stood there, sweating and purple. “It’s empty!” he shouted; and then he saw it wasn’t empty. Over in one corner on the floor of the cage, there was an eye. The eye was in the middle of something that looked like a piece of mop and the piece of mop was sitting on an old rag. He squinted close to the wire and saw that the piece of mop was an owl with one eye open. It was looking directly at Hazel Weaver. “That ain’t nothing but an all’ hoot owl,” he moaned. “You seen them before.”
“I ain’t clean,” Haze said to the eye, He said it Just like he said it to the woman in the FROSTY BOTTLE. The eye shut softly and the owl turned its head to the wall.
He’s done murdered somebody, Enoch thought. “Oh sweet Jesus come on!” he wailed. “I got to show you this right now.” He pulled him away but a few feet from the cage Haze stopped again, looking at something in the distance. Enoch’s eyesight was very poor. He squinted and made out a figure far down the road behind them. There were two smaller figures jumping on either side of it.
Hazel Weaver turned back to him suddenly and said, “Where’s this thing? Let’s see it right now. Come on.”
“Ain’t that where I been trying to take you,” Enoch murmured. He felt the perspiration drying on him and stinging and his skin began to get pin-pointed, even in his scalp. “We got to go on foot,” he said.
“Why?” Haze muttered.
“I don’t know,” Enoch said. He knew something was going to happen to him. He knew something was going to happen to him. His blood stopped beating. All the time it had been beating like drum noises and now it had stopped. They started down the hill. It was a steep hill, full of trees painted white from the ground up four feet. They looked as if they had on ankle-socks. He gripped Hazel Weaver’s arm. “It gets damp as you go down,” he said, looking around vaguely. Hazel Weaver shook him off. In a second, he gripped his arm again and stopped him. He pointed down through the trees. “Muvseevum,” he said. The strange word made him shiver. That was the first time he had ever said it aloud. A piece of gray building was showing where he pointed. It grew larger as they went down the hill, then as they came to the end of the wood and stepped out on the gravel driveway, it seemed to shrink suddenly. It was round and soot-colored. There were columns at the front of it and in between each column there was an eyeless woman holding a pot on her head. A concrete band was over the columns and the letters M V S E V M were cut into it. Enoch was afraid to pronounce the word again.
“We got to go up the steps and through the front door,” he whispered. There were ten steps up to the porch. The door was wide and black. Enoch pushed it in cautiously and inserted his head in the crack. In a minute he brought it out again and said, “All right, go in and walk easy. I don’t want to wake up theter ole guard. He ain’t very friendly with me.” They went into a dark hall. It was heavy with the odor of linoleum and creosote and another odor behind these two. The third one was an undersmell and Enoch couldn’t name it as anything he had ever smelled before. There was nothing in the hall but two urns and an old man asleep in a straight chair against the wall. He had on the same kind of uniform as Enoch and he looked like a dried up spider stuck there. Enoch looked at Hazel Weaver to see if he was smelling the undersmell. He looked like he was; Enoch’s blood began beating again, and the sound was nearer this time like the drums had moved up about a quarter of a mile. He gripped Haze’s arm and tiptoed through the hall to another black door at the end of it. He cracked it a little and inserted his head in the crack. Then in a second he drew it out and crooked his finger in a gesture for Haze to follow him. They went into another hall, like the last one but running crosswise. “It’s in that first door yonder,” Enoch said in a small voice. They went into a dark room full of glass cases. The glass cases covered the walls and there were three coffin-like ones in the middle of the floor. The ones on the walls were full of birds tilted on varnished sticks and looking down with dried piquant expressions.
“Come on,” Enoch whispered. The drum noises in his blood were getting closer and closer. He went past the two cases in the middle of the floor and toward the third one. He went to the farthest end of it and stopped. He stood looking down with his neck thrust forward and his hands clutched together; Hazel Weaver moved up beside him.
The two of them stood there, Enoch rigid and Hazel Weaver bent slightly forward. There were three bowls and a row of blunt weapons and a man in the case. It was the man Enoch was looking at. He was about three feet long. He was naked and a dried yellow color and his eyes were squinched shut as if a giant block of steel were falling down on top of him.
“See theter notice,” Enoch said in a church whisper, pointing to a typewritten card at the man’s foot, “it says he was once as tall as us. Some A-rabs did it to him in six months.” He turned his head cautiously to see Hazel Weaver.
All he could tell was that Hazel Weaver ‘s eyes were on the shrunken man. He was bent forward so that his face was reflected in the glass top of the case. The reflection was pale and the eyes were like two clean bullet holes. Enoch waited, rigid. He heard footsteps in the hall. Oh Jesus Jesus, he prayed, let him hurry up and do whatever he’s going to do! The footsteps came in the door. He saw the woman with the two little boys. She had one by each hand, and she was grinning. Hazel Weaver had not raised his eyes once from the shrunken man. The woman came toward them. She stopped on the other side of the case and looked down into it, and the reflection of her face appeared grinning on the glass, over Hazel Weaver’s, She snickered and put two fingers in front of her teeth, The little boys’ faces were like pans set on either side to catch the grins us that overflowed from her. Haze’s neck jerked back and he made a noise, It was a noise like Enoch hadn’t ever heard before, It might have come from the man inside the case. In a second Enoch knew it had, “Wait!” he screamed, and tore out the room after Hazel Weaver.
He overtook him halfway up the hill. He caught him by the arm and swung him around and then he stood there, suddenly weak and light as a balloon, and stared. Hazel Weaver grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “What is that address?” he shouted, “Give me that address!”
Even if Enoch had known the address, he couldn’t have thought of it then. He could not even stand up. As soon as Hazel Weaver let him go, he fell backwards and landed against one of the whitesocked trees. He rolled over and lay stretched out on the ground, with an exalted look on his face. He thought he was floating. A long way off he saw the blue figure spring and pick up a rock, and he saw the wild face turn, and the rock hurtle toward him; he smiled and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, Hazel Weaver was gone. He put his fingers to his forehead and then held them in front of his eyes. They were red-streaked, He turned his head and saw a drop of blood on the ground and as he looked at it, he thought it widened like a little spring, He sat straight up, frozen-skinned, and put his finger in it. and very faintly he could hear his blood beating, his secret blood, in the center of the city.
A Stroke of Good Fortune (1949)
RUBY came in the front door of the apartment building and lowered the paper sack with the four cans of number three beans in it onto the hall table. She was too tired to take her arms from around it or to straighten up and she hung there collapsed from the hips, her head balanced like a big florid vegetable at the top of the sack. She gazed with stony unrecognition at the face that confronted her in the dark yellow-spotted mirror over the table. Against her right cheek was a gritty collard leaf that had been stuck there half the way home. She gave it a vicious swipe with her arm and straightened up, muttering, “Collards, collards,” in a voice of sultry subdued wrath. Standing up straight, she was a short woman, shaped nearly like a funeral urn. She had mulberry-colored hair stacked in sausage rolls around her head but some of these had come loose with the heat and the long walk from the grocery store and pointed frantically in various directions. “Collard greens!” she said, spitting the word from her mouth this time as if it were a poisonous seed.
She and Bill Hill hadn’t eaten collard greens for five years and she wasn’t going to start cooking them now. She had bought these on account of Rufus but she wasn’t going to buy them but once. You would have thought that after two years in the armed forces Rufus would have come back ready to eat like somebody from somewhere; but no. When she asked him what he would like to have special, he had not had the gumption to think of one civilized dish—he had said collard greens. She had expected Rufus to have turned out into somebody with some get in him. Well, he had about as much get as a floor mop.
Rufus was her baby brother who had just come back from the European Theater. He had come to live with her because Pitman where they were raised was not there any more. All the people who had lived in Pitman had had the good sense to leave it, either by dying or by moving to the city. She had married Bill B. Hill, a Florida man who sold Miracle Products, and had come to live in the city. If Pitman had still been there, Rufus would have been in Pitman. If one chicken had been left to walk across the road in Pitman, Rufus would have been there too to keep him company. She didn’t like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was—good for absolutely nothing. “I seen it after five minutes of him,” she had told Bill Hill and Bill Hill, with no expression whatsoever, had said, “It taken me three.” It was mortifying to let that kind of a husband see you had that kind of a brother.
She supposed there was no help for it. Rufus was like the other children. She was the only one in her family who had been different, who had had any get. She took a stub of pencil from her pocketbook and wrote on the side of the sack: Bill you bring this upstairs. Then she braced herself at the bottom of the steps for the climb to the fourth floor.
The steps were thin black rent in the middle of the house, covered with a mole-colored carpet that looked as if it grew from the floor. They stuck straight up like steeple steps, it seemed to her. They reared up. The minute she stood at the bottom of them, they reared up and got steeper for her benefit. As she gazed up them, her mouth widened and turned down in a look of complete disgust. She was in no condition to go up anything. She was sick. Madam Zoleeda had told her but not before she knew it herself.
Madam Zoleeda was the palmist on Highway 87. She had said, “A long illness,” but she had added, whispering, with a very l-already- know-but-l-won’t-tell look, “It will bring you a stroke of good fortune!” and then had sat back grinning, a stout woman with green eyes that moved in their sockets as if they had been oiled. Ruby didn’t need to be told. She had already figured out the good fortune. Moving. For two months she had had a distinct feeling that they were going to move. Bill Hill couldn’t hold off much longer. He couldn’t kill her. Where she wanted to be was in a subdivision—she started up the steps, leaning forward and holding onto the banisters—where you had your drugstores and grocery and a picture show right in your own neighborhood. As it was now, living downtown, she had to walk eight blocks to the main business streets and farther than that to get to a supermarket. She hadn’t made any complaints for five years much but now with her health at stake as young as she was what did he think she was going to do, kill herself? She had her eye on a place in Meadowcrest Heights, a duplex bungalow with yellow awnings. She stopped on the fifth step to blow. As young as she was—thirty-four—you wouldn’t think five steps would stew her. You better take it easy, baby, she told herself, you’re too young to bust your gears.
Thirty-four wasn’t old, wasn’t any age at all. She remembered her mother at thirty-four-she had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like she wasn’t satisfied with anything. She compared herself at thirtyfour with her mother at that age. Her mother’s hair had been gray—hers wouldn’t be gray now even if she hadn’t touched it up. All those children were what did her mother in—eight of them: two born dead, one died the first year, one crushed under a mowing machine. Her mother had got deader with everyone of them. And all of for what? Because she hadn’t known any better. Pure ignorance. The purest of downright ignorance!
And there her two sisters were, both married four years with four children apiece. She didn’t see how they stood it, always going to the doctor to be jabbed at with instruments. She remembered when her mother had had Rufus. She was the only one of the children who couldn’t stand it and she walked all the way in to Melsy, in the hot sun ten miles, to the picture show to get clear of the screaming, and had sat through two westerns and a horror picture and a serial and then had walked all the way back and found it was just beginning, and she had had to listen all night. All that misery for Rufus! And him turned out now to have no more charge than a dish rag. She saw him waiting out nowhere before he was born, just waiting, waiting to make his mother, only thirtyfour, into an old woman. She gripped the banister rail fiercely and heaved herself up another step, shaking her head. Lord, she was disappointed in him! After she had told all her friends her brother was back from the European Theater, here he comes—sounding like he’d never been out of a hog lot.
He looked old too. He looked older than she did and he was fourteen years younger. She was extremely young looking for her age. Not that thirtyfour is any age and anyway she was married. She had to smile, thinking about that, because she had done so much better than her sisters—they had married from around. “This breathlessness,” she muttered, stopping again. She decided she would have to sit down.
There were twenty-eight steps in each flight—twenty-eight.
She sat down and jumped quickly, feeling something under her. She caught her breath and then pulled the thing out: it was Hartley Gilfeet’s pistol. Nine inches of treacherous tin! He was a six-year old boy who lived on the fifth floor. If he had been hers, she’d have worn him out so hard so many times he wouldn’t know how to leave his mess on a public stair. She could have fallen down those stairs as easy as not and ruined herself! But his stupid mother wasn’t going to do anything to him even if she told her. All she did was scream at him and tell people how smart he was. “Little Mister Good Fortune!” she called him. “All his poor daddy left me!” His daddy had said on his death bed, “There’s nothing but him I ever given you,” and she had said, “Rodman, you given me a fortune!” and so she called him Little Mister Good Fortune. “I’d wear the seat of his good fortune out!” Ruby muttered.
The steps were going up and down like a seesaw with her in the middle of it. She did not want to get nauseated. Not that again. Now no. No. She was not. She sat tightly to the steps with her eyes shut until the dizziness stopped a little and the nausea subsided. No, I’m not going to no doctor, she said. No. No. She was not. They would have to carry her there knocked out before she would go. She had done all right doctoring herself all these years—no bad sick spells, no teeth out, no children, all that by herself. She would have had five children right now if she hadn’t been careful, She had wondered more than once if this breathlessness could be heart trouble. Once in a while, going up the steps, there’d be a pain in her chest along with it. That was what she wanted it to be—heart trouble. They couldn’t very well remove your heart. They’d have to knock her in the head before they’d get her near a hospital, they’d have to—suppose she would die if they didn’t.
She wouldn’t.
Suppose she would?
She made herself stop this gory thinking. She was only thirty-four. There was nothing permanent wrong with her. She was fat and her color was good. She thought of herself again in comparison with her mother at thirtyfour and she pinched her arm and smiled. Seeing that her mother or father neither had been Inuch to look at, she had done very well. They had been the dried-up type dried up and Pitman dried into them, them and Pitman shrunk down into something all dried and puckered up. And she had come out of that! A somebody as alive as her! She got up, gripping the banister rail but smiling to herself. She was warm and tat and beautiful and not too fat because Bill Hill liked her that way. She had gained some weight but he hadn’t noticed except that he was maybe more happy lately and didn’t know why. She felt the wholeness of herself, a whole thing climbing the stairs. She was up the first Hight now and she looked back, pleased. As soon as Bill Hill fell clown these steps once, maybe they would move. But they would move before that! Madam Zoleeda had known. She laughed aloud and, noved on down the hall. Mr. Jerger’s door grated and startled her. Oh Lord, she thought, him. He was a second-floor resident who was peculiar.
He peered at her coming down the hall. “Good morning!” he said, bowing the upper part of his body out the door. “Good morning to you!” He looked like a goat. He had little raisin eyes and a string beard and his jacket was a green that was almost black or a black that was almost green.
“Morning,” she said. “Hower you?”
“Well!” he screamed. “Well indeed on this glorious, day!” He was seventy-eight years old and his face looked as if it hal mildew on it. In the mornings he studied and in the afternoons he walked up and down the sidewalks, stopping children and asking them questions. Whenever he heard anyone in the hall, he opener: his door and looked out.
“Yeah, it’s a nice day,” she said languidly.
“Do you know what great birthday this is?” he asked.
“Uh-uh,” Ruby said. He always had a question like that. A history question that nobody knew; he would ask it and then make a speech on it. He used to teach in a high school.
“Guess,” he urged her.
“Abraham Lincoln,” she muttered.
“Hah! You are not trying,” he said. “Try.”
“George Washington,” she said, starting up the stairs.
“Shame on you!” he cried. “And your husband from there! Florida! Florida! Florida’s birthday,” he shouted. “Come in here.” He disappeared into his room, beckoning a long finger at her.
She came down the two steps and said, “I gotta be going,” and stuck her head inside the door. The room was the size of a large closet and the walls were completely covered with picture postcards of local buildings; this gave an illusion of space. A single transparent bulb hung down on Mr. Jerger and a small table.
“Now examine this,” he said. He was bending over a book, running his finger under the lines: “‘On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1516, he arrived on the tip of this continent.’ Do you know who this he was?” he demanded.
“Yeah, Christopher Columbus.” Ruby said.
“Ponce de Leon!” he screamed. “Ponce de Leon’ You should know something about Florida,” he said. “Your husband is from Florida.”
“Yeah, he was born in Miami,” Ruby said. “He’s not from Tennessee.”
“Florida is not a noble state,” Mr. Jerger said, “but it is an important one.”
“It’s important alrighto,” Ruby said.
“Do you know who Ponce de Leon was?”
“He was the founder of Florida,” Ruby said brightly.
“He was a Spaniard,” Mr. Jerger said. “Do you know what he was looking for?”
“Florida,” Ruby said.
“Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth,” Mr. Jerger said, closing his eyes.
“Oh,” Ruby muttered.
“A certain spring,” Mr. Jerger went on, “whose water gave perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words,” he said, “he was trying to be young always.”
“Did he find it?” Ruby asked.
Mr. Jerger paused with his eyes still closed. After a minute he said, “Do you think he found it? Do you think he found it? Do you think nobody else would have got to it if he had found it? Do you think there would be one person living on this earth who hadn’t drunk it?”
“I hadn’t thought,” Ruby said.
“Nobody thinks any more,” Mr. Jerger complained.
“I got to be going.”
“Yes, it’s been found,” Mr. Jerger said.
“Where at?” Ruby asked.
“I have drunk of it.”
“Where’d you have to go to?” she asked. She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard’s wing.
“Into my heart,” he said, placing his hand over it.
“Oh.” Ruby moved back. “I gotta be going. I think my brother’s home.” She got over the door sill.
“Ask your husband if he knows what great birthday this is,” Mr. Jerger said, looking at her coyly.
“Yeah, I will.” She turned and waited until she heard his door click. She looked back to see that it was shut and then she blew out her breath and stood facing the dark remaining steep of steps. “God Almighty,” she commented. They got darker and steeper as you went up.
By the time she had climbed five steps her breath was gone. She continued up a few more, blowing. Then she stopped. There was a pain in her stomach. It was a pain like a piece of something pushing something else. She had felt it before, a few days ago. It was the one that frightened her most. She had thought the word cancer once and dropped it instantly because no horror like that was coming to her because it couldn’t. The word came back to her immediately with the pain but she slashed it in two with Madam Zoleeda. It will end in good fortune. She slashed it twice through and then again until there were only pieces of it that couldn’t be recognized. She was going to stop on the next floor—God, if she ever got up there—and talk to Laverne Watts. Laverne Watts was a third-floor resident, the secretary to a chiropodist, and an especial friend of hers.
She got up there, gasping and feeling as if her knees were full of fizz, and knocked on Laverne’s door with the butt of Hartley Gilfeet’s gun. She leaned on the door frame to rest and suddenly the floor around her dropped on both sides. The wall, turned black and she felt herself reeling, without breath, in the nnldle of the air, terrified at the drop that was coming. She saw the door open a great distance away and Laverne, about four inches high, standing in it.
Laverne, a tall straw-haired girl, let out a great guffaw and slapped her side as if she had just opened the door on the most comical sight she had yet seen. “That gun!” she yelled. “That gun! That look!” She staggered back to the sofa and fell on it, her legs rising higher than her hips and falling down again helplessly with a thud.
The floor came up to where Ruby could see it and remained, dipping a little. With a terrible stare of concentration, she stepped down to get on it. She scrutinized a chair across the room and then headed for it, putting her feet carefully one before the other.
“You should be in a wild-west show!” Laverne Watts said. “You’re a howl!”
Ruby reached the chair and then edged herself onto it. “Shut up,” she said hoarsely.
Laverne sat forward, pointing at her, and then fell back on the sofa, shaking again.
“Quit that!” Ruby yelled. “Quit that! I’m sick.”
Laverne got up and took two or three long strides across the room. She leaned down in front of Ruby and looked into her face with one eye shut as if she were squinting through a keyhole. “You are sort of purple,” she said.
“I’m damn sick,” Ruby glowered.
Laverne stood looking at her and after a second she folded her arms and very pointedly stuck her stomach out and began to sway back and forth. “Well, what’d you come inhere wi th that gun for? Where’d you get it?” she asked.
“Sat on it,” Ruby muttered.
Laverne stood there, swaying with her stomach stuck out, and a very wise expression growing on her face. Ruby sat sprawled in the chair, looking at her feet. The room was getting still. She sat up and glared at her ankles. They were swollen! I’m not going to no doctor, she started, I’m not going to one. I’m not going. “Not going,” she began to mumble, “to no doctor, not…”
“How long you think you can hold off?” Laverne murmured and began to giggle.
“Are my ankles swollen?” Ruby asked.
“They look like they’ve always looked to me,” Laverne said, throwing herself down on the sofa again. “Kind of fat.” She lifted her own ankles up on the end pillow and turned them slightly. “How do you like these shoes?” she asked. They were a grasshopper green with very high thin heels.
“I think they’re swollen,” Ruby said. “When I was coming up that last flight of stairs I had the awfulest feeling, all over me like…”
“You ought to go on to the doctor.”
“I don’t need to go to no doctor,” Ruby muttered. “I can take care of myself. I haven’t done bad at it all this time.”
“Is Rufus at home?”
“I don’t know. I kept myself away from doctors all my life. I kept—why?”
“Why what?”
“Why, is Rufus at home?”
“Rufus is cute,” Laverne said. “I thought I’d ask him how he liked my shoes.”
Ruby sat up with a fierce look, very pink and purple. “Why Rufus?” she growled. “He ain’t but a baby.” Laverne was thirty years old. “He don’t care about women’s shoes.”
Laverne sat up and took off one of the shoes and peered inside it. “Nine B,” she said. “I bet he’d like what’s in it.”
“That Rufus ain’t but an enfant!” Ruby said. “He don’t have time to be looking at your feet. He ain’t got that kind of time.”
“Oh, he’s got plenty of time,” Laverne said.
“Yeah,” Ruby muttered and saw him again, waiting, with plenty of time, out nowhere before he was born, just waiting to make his mother that much deader.
“I believe your ankles are swollen,” Laverne said.
“Yeah,” Ruby said, twisting them. “Yeah. They feel tight sort of. I had the awfulest feeling when I got up those steps, like sort of out of breath all over, sort of tight all over, sort of—awful.”
“You ought to go on to the doctor.”
“No.”
“You ever been to one?”
“They carried me once when I was ten,” Ruby said, “but I got away. Three of them holding me didn’t do any good.”
“What was it that time?”
“What you looking at me that way for?” Ruby muttered.
“What way?”
“That way,” Ruby said, “—swagging out that stomach of yours that way.”
“I just asked you what it was that time?”
“It was a boil. A nigger woman up the road told me what to do and I did it and it went away.” She sat slumped on the edge of the chair, staring in front of her as if she were remembering an easier time.
Laverne began to do a kind of comic dance up and down the room. She took two or three slow steps in one direction with her knees bent and then she came back and kicked her leg slowly and painfully in the other. She began to sing in a loud guttural voice, rolling her eyes, “Put them all together, they spell MOTHER! MOTHER!” and stretching out her arms as if she were on the stage.
Ruby’s mouth opened wordlessly and her fierce expression vanished. For a half-second she was motionless; then she sprang from the chair. “Not me!” she shouted. “Not me!”
Laverne stopped and only watched her with the wise look.
“Not me!” Ruby shouted. “Oh no not me! Bill Hill takes care of that. Bill Hill takes care of that! Bill Hill’s been taking care of that for five years! That ain’t going to happen to me!”
“Well old Bill Hill just slipped up about four or five months ago, my friend,” Laverne said. “Just slipped up…”
“I don’t reckon you know anything about it, you ain’t even married, you ain’t even…”
“I bet it’s not one, I bet it’s two,” Laverne said. “You better go on to the doctor and find out how many it is.”
“It is not!” Ruby shrilled. She thought she was so smart! She didn’t know a sick woman when she saw one, all she could do was look at her feet and shoe em to Rufus, shoe em to Rufus and he was an enfant and she was thirtyfour years old. “Rufus is an enfant!” she wailed.
“That will make two!” Laverne said.
“You shut up talking like that!” Ruby shouted. “You shut up this minute. I ain’t going to have any baby!”
“Ha ha,” Laverne said.
“I don’t know how you think you know so much,” Ruby said, “single as you are. If I was so single I wouldn’t go around telling married people what their business is.”
“Not just your ankles,” Laverne said, “you’re swollen all over.”
“I ain’t going to stay here and be insulted,” Ruby said and walked carefully to the door, keeping herself erect and not looking down at her stomach the way she wanted to.
“Well I hope all of you feel better tomorrow,” Laverne said.
“I think my heart will be better tomorrow,” Ruby said. “But I hope we will be moving soon. I can’t climb these steps with this heart trouble and,” she added with a dignified glare, “Rufus don’t care nothing about your big feet.”
“You better put that gun up,” Laverne said, “before you shoot somebody.”
Ruby slammed the door shut and looked down at herself quickly. She was big there but she had always had a kind of big stomach. She did not stick out there different from the way she did any place else. It was natural when you took on some weight to take it on in the middle and Bill Hill didn’t mind her being fat, he was just more happy and didn’t know why. She saw Bill Hill’s long happy face, grinning at her from the eyes downward in a way he had as if his look got happier as it neared his teeth. He would never slip up. She rubbed her hand across her skirt and felt the tightness of it but hadn’t she felt that before? She had. It was the skirt—she had on the tight one that she didn’t wear often, she had… she didn’t have on the tight skirt. She had on the loose one. But it wasn’t very loose. But that didn’t make any difference, she was just fat.
She put her fingers on her stomach and pushed down and took them off quickly. She began walking toward the stairs, slowly, as if the floor were going to move under her. She began the steps. The pain came back at once. It came back with the first step. “No,” she whimpered, “no.” It was just a little feeling, just a little feeling like a piece of her inside rolling over but it made her breath tighten in her throat. Nothing in her was supposed to roll over. “Just one step,” she whispered, “Just one step and it did it.” It couldn’t be cancer. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in good fortune. She began crying and saying, “Just one step and it did it,” and going on up them absently as if she thought she were standing still. On the sixth one, she sat down suddenly, her hand slipping weakly down the banister spoke onto the floor.
“Noooo,” she said and leaned her round red face between the two nearest poles. She looked down into the stairwell and gave a long hollow wail that widened and echoed as it went down. The stair cavern was dark green and mole-colored and the wail sounded at the very bottom like a voice answering her. She gasped and shut her eyes. No. No. It couldn’t be any baby. She was not going to have something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not. Bill Hill couldn’t have slipped up. He said it was guaranteed and it had worked all this time and it could not be that, it could not. She shuddered and held her hand tightly over her mouth. She felt her face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one run under like a dried yellow apple no she was only thirtyfour years old, she was old. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in no drying up. Madam Zoleeda said oh but it will end in a stroke of good fortune! Moving. She had said it would end in a stroke of good moving.
She felt herself getting calmer. She felt herself, after a minute, getting almost calm and thought she got upset too easy; heck, it was gas. Madam Zoleeda hadn’t been wrong about anything yet, she knew more than…
She jumped: there was a bang at the bottom of the stairwell and a rumble rattling up the steps, shaking them even up where she was. She looked through the banister poles and saw Hartley Gilfeet, with two pistols leveled, galloping up the stairs and heard a voice pierce down from the floor over her, “You Hartley, shut up that racket! You’re shaking the house!” But he came on, thundering louder as he rounded the bend on the first floor and streaked up the hall. She saw Mr. Jerger’s door fly open and him spring with clawed fingers and grasp a flying piece of shirt that whirled and shot off again with a high-pitched, “Leggo, you old goat teacher!” and came on nearer until the stairs rumbled directly under her and a charging chipmunk face crashed into her and rocketed through her head, smaller and smaller into a whirl of dark.
She sat on the step, clutching the banister spoke while the breath came back into her a thimbleful at a time and the stairs stopped seesawing. She opened her eyes and gazed down into the dark hold, down to the very bottom where she had started up so long ago. “Good Fortune,” she said in a hollow voice that echoed along all the levels of the cavern, “Baby.”
“Good Fortune, Baby,” the three echoes leered.
Then she recognized the feeling again, a little roll. It was as if it were not in her stomach. It was as if it were out nowhere in nothing, out nowhere, resting and waiting, with plenty of time.
Enoch and the Gorilla (1952)
ENOCH EMERY had borrowed his landlady’s umbrella and he discovered as he stood in the entrance of the drugstore, trying to open it, that it was at least as old as she was, When he finally got it hoisted, he pushed his dark glasses back on his eyes and re-entered the downpour.
The umbrella was one his landlady had stopped using fifteen years before (which was the only reason she had lent it to him) and as soon as the rain touched the top of it, it came down with a shriek and stabbed him in the back of the neck. He ran a few feet with it over his head and then backed into another store entrance and removed it. Then to get it up again, he had to place the tip of it on the ground and ram it open with his foot. He ran out again, holding his hand up near the spokes to keep them open and this allowed the handle, which was carved to represent the head of a fox terrier, to jab him every few seconds in the stomach. He proceeded for another quarter of a block this way before the back half half the silk stood up off the spokes and allowed the storm to sweep down his collar. Then he ducked under the marquee of a movie house. It was Saturday and there were a lot of children standing more or less in a line in front of the ticket box.
Enoch was not very fond of children, but children always seemed to like to look at him. The line turned and twenty or thirty eyes began to observe him with a steady interest. The umbrella had assumed an ugly position, half up and half down, and the half that was up was about to come down and spill more water under his collar. When this happened the children laughed and jumped up and down. Enoch glared at them and turned his back and lowered his dark glasses. He found himself facing a life-size four-color picture of a gorilla. Over the gorilla’s head, written in red letters was “GANGA! Giant Jungle Monarch and a Great Star! HERE IN PERSON!!!” At the level of the gorilla’s knee, there was more that said, “Gonga will appear in person in front of this theater at 12 A.M. TODAY! A free pass to the first ten brave enough to step up and shake his hand!” Enoch was usually thinking of something else at the moment that Fate began drawing back her leg to kick him. When he was four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, “A NUTTY SURPRISE!” When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger. He stood there and read the poster twice through carefully. To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence.
He turned around and asked the nearest child what time it was. The child said it was twelve-ten and that Gonga was already ten minutes late. Another child said that maybe the rain had delayed him. Another said, no not the rain, his director was taking a plane from Hollywood. Enoch gritted his teeth. The first child said that if he wanted to shake the star’s hand, he would have to get in line like the rest of them and wait his turn. Enoch got in line. A child asked him how old he was. Another observed that he had funnylooking teeth. He ignored all this as best he could and began to straighten out the umbrella.
In a few minutes a black truck turned around the corner and came slowly up the street in the heavy rain. Enoch pushed the umbrella under his arm and began to squint through his dark glasses. As the truck approached, a phonograph inside it began to play “Tarara Boom Di Aye,” but the music was almost drowned out by the rain. There was a large illustration of a blonde on the outside of the truck, advertising some picture other than the gorilla’s.
The children held their line carefully as the truck stopped in front of the movie house. The back door of it was constructed like a paddy wagon, with a grate, but the ape was not at it. Two men in raincoats got out of the cab part, cursing, and ran around to the back and opened the door. One of them stuck his head in and said, “Okay, make it snappy, willya?” The other jerked his thumb at the children and said, “Get back willya, willya get back?”
A voice on the record inside the truck said, “Here’s Gonga, folks, Roaring Gonga and a Great Star! Give Gonga a big hand, folks!” The voice was barely a mumble in the rain.
The man who was waiting by the door of the truck stuck his head in again. “Okay willya get out?” he said.
There was a faint thump somewhere inside the van. After a second a dark furry arm emerged just enough for the rain to touch it and then drew back inside.
“Goddamn,” the man who was under the marquee said; he took off his raincoat and threw it to the man by the door, who threw it into the wagon. After two or three minutes more, the gorilla appeared at the door, with the raincoat buttoned up to his chin and the collar turned up. There was an iron chain hanging from around his neck; the man grabbed it and pulled him down and the two of them bounded under the marquee together. A motherly-looking woman was in the glass ticket box, getting the passes ready for the first ten children brave enough to step up and shake hands.
The gorilla ignored the children entirely and followed the man over to the other side of the entrance where there was a small platform raised about a foot off the ground. He stepped up on it and turned facing the children and began to growl. His growls were not so much loud as poisonous; they appeared to issue from a black heart. Enoch was terrified and if he had not been surrounded by the children, he would have run away.
“Who’ll step up first?” the man said. “Come on come on, who’ll step up first? A free pass to the first kid stepping up.”
There was no movement from the group of children. The man glared at them. “What’s the matter with you kids?” he barked. “You yellow? He won’t hurt you as long as I got him by this chain.” He tightened his grip on the chain and jangled it at them to show he was holding it securely.
After a minute a little girl separated herself from the group. She had long wood-shaving curls and a fierce triangular face. She moved up to within four feet of the star.
“Okay okay,” the man said, rattling the chain, “make it snappy.”
The ape reached out and gave her hand a quick shake. By this time there was another little girl ready and then two boys. The line reformed and began to move up.
The gorilla kept his hand extended and turned his head away with a bored look at the rain. Enoch had got over his fear and was trying frantically to think of an obscene remark that would be suitable to insult him with. Usually he didn’t have any trouble with this kind of composition but nothing came to him now. His brain, both parts, was completely empty. He couldn’t think even of the insulting phrases he used every day.
There were only two children in front of him by now. The first one shook hands and stepped aside. Enoch’s heart was beating violently. The child in front of him finished and stepped aside and left him facing the ape, who took his hand with an automatic motion.
It was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come to the city. It was warm and soft.
For a second he only stood there, clasping it. Then he began to stammer. “My name is Enoch Emery,” he mumbled. “I attended the Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy. I work at the city zoo. I seen two of your pictures. I’m only eighteen years old but I already work for the city. My daddy made me come” and his voice cracked.
The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair. “You go to hell,” a surly voice inside the ape-suit said, low but distinctly, and the hand was jerked away.
Enoch’s humiliation was so sharp and painful that he turned around three times before he realized which direction he wanted to go in. Then he ran off into the rain as fast as he could.
In spite of himself, Enoch couldn’t get over the expectation that something was going to happen to him. The virtue of hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust. It operated on him all the rest of the day. He had only a vague idea what he wanted, but he was not a boy without ambition: he wanted to become something. He wanted to better his condition. He wanted, some day, to see a line of people waiting to shake his hand.
All afternoon he fidgeted and fooled in his room, biting his nails and shredding what was left of the silk off the landlady’s umbrella. Finally he denuded it entirely and broke off the spokes. What was left was a black stick with a sharp steel point at one end and a dog’s head at the other. It might have been an instrument for some specialized kind of torture that had gone out of fashion. Enoch walked up and down his room with it under his arm and realized that it would distinguish him on the sidewalk.
About seven o’clock in the evening he put on his coat and took the stick and headed for a little restaurant two blocks away. He had the sense that he was setting off to get some honor, but he was very nervous, as if he were afraid he might have to snatch it instead of receive it.
He never set out for anything without eating first. The restaurant was called the Paris Diner; it was a tunnel about six feet wide, located between a shoeshine parlor and a dry-cleaning establishment. Enoch slid in and climbed up on the far stool at the counter and said he would have a bowl of split-pea soup and a chocolate malted milkshake.
The waitress was a tall woman with a big yellow dental plate and the same color hair done up in a black hairnet, One hand never left her hip; she filled orders with the other one. Although Enoch came in every night, she had never learned to like him.
Instead of filling his order, she began to fry bacon; there was only one other customer in the place and he had finished his meal and was reading a newspaper; there was no one to eat the bacon but her. Enoch reached over the counter and prodded her hip with the stick. “Listenhere,” he said, “I got to go. I’m in a hurry.”
“Go then,” she said. Her jaw began to work and she stared into the skillet with a fixed attention.
“Lemme just have a piece of theter cake yonder,” he said, pointing to a half of pink and yellow cake on a round glass stand. “I think I got something to do. I got to be going. Set it up there next to him,” he said, indicating the customer reading the newspaper. He slid over the stools and began reading the outside sheet of the man’s paper.
The man lowered the paper and looked at him. Enoch smiled. The man raised the paper again. “Could I borrow some part of your paper that you ain’t studying?” Enoch asked. The man lowered it again and stared at him; he had muddy unflinching eyes. He leafed deliberately through the paper and shook out the sheet with the comic strips and handed it to Enoch. It was Enoch’s favorite part. He read it every evening like an office. While he ate the cake that the waitress had torpedoed down the counter at him, he read and felt himself surge with kindness and courage and strength.
When he finished one side, he turned the sheet over and began to scan the advertisements for movies that filled the other side. His eye went over three columns without stopping; then it came to a box that advertised Gonga, Giant Jungle Monarch, and listed the theaters he would visit on his tour and the hours he would be at each one. In thirty minutes he would arrive at the Victory on 57th Street and that would be his last appearance in the city.
If anyone had watched Enoch read this, he would have seen a certain transformation in his countenance. It still shone with the inspiration he had absorbed from the comic strips, but something else had come over it: a look of awakening.
The waitress happened to turn around to see if he hadn’t gone.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Did you swallow a seed?”
“I know what I want,” Enoch murmured.
“I know what I want too,” she said with a dark look.
Enoch felt for his stick and laid his change on the counter. “I got to be going.”
“Don’t let me keep you,” she said.
“You may not see me again,” he said,”—the way I am.
“Any way I don’t see you will be all right with me,” she said.
Enoch left. It was a pleasant damp evening. The puddles on the sidewalk shone and the store windows were steamy and bright with junk. He disappeared down a side street and made his way rapidly along the darker passages of the city, pausing only once or twice at the end of an alley to dart a glance in each direction before he ran on. The Victory was a small theater, suited to the needs of the family, in one of the closer subdivisions; he passed through a succession of lighted areas and then on through more alleys and back streets until he came to the business section that surrounded it. Then he slowed up. He saw it about a block away, glittering in its darker setting. He didn’t cross the street to the side it was on but kept on the far side, moving forward with his squint fixed on the glary spot. He stopped when he was directly across from it and hid himself in a narrow stair cavity that divided a building.
The truck that carried Gonga was parked across the street and the star was standing under the marquee, shaking hands with an elderly woman. She moved aside and a gentleman in a polo shirt stepped up and shook hands vigorously, like a sportsman. He was followed by a boy of about three who wore a tall Western hat that nearly covered his face; he had to be pushed ahead by the line. Enoch watched for some time, his face working with envy. The small boy was followed by a lady in shorts, she by an old man who tried to draw extra attention to himself by dancing up instead of walking in a dignified way. Enoch suddenly darted across the street and slipped noiselessly into the open back door of the truck.
The handshaking went on until the feature picture was ready to begin. Then the star got back in the van and the people filed into the theater. The driver and the man who was master of ceremonies climbed in the cab part and the truck rumbled off. It crossed the city rapidly and continued on the highway, going very fast.
There came from the van certain thumping noises, not those of the normal gorilla, but they were drowned out by the drone of the motor and the steady sound of wheels against the road. The night was pale and quiet, with nothing to stir it but an occasional complaint from a hoot owl and the distant muted jarring of a freight train. The truck sped on until it slowed for a crossing, and as the van rattled over the tracks, a figure slipped from the door and almost fell, and then limped hurriedly off toward the woods.
Once in the darkness of a pine thicket, he laid down a pointed stick he had been clutching and something bulky and loose that he had been carrying under his arm, and began to undress. He folded each garment neatly after he had taken it off and then stacked it on top of the last thing he had removed. When all his clothes were in the pile, he took up the stick and began making a hole in the ground with it.
The darkness of the pine grove was broken by paler moonlit spots that moved over him now and again and showed him to be Enoch. His natural appearance was marred by a gash that ran from the corner of his lip to his collarbone and by a lump under his eye that gave him a dulled insensitive look. Nothing could have been more deceptive for he was burning with the intensest kind of happiness.
He dug rapidly until he had made a trench about a foot long and a foot deep. Then he placed the stack of clothes in it and stood aside to rest a second. Burying his clothes was not a symbol to him of burying his former self; he only knew he wouldn’t need them any more. As soon as he got his breath, he pushed the displaced dirt over the hole and stamped it down with his foot. He discovered while he did this that he still had his shoes on, and when he finished, he removed them and threw them from him. Then he picked up the loose bulky object and shook it vigorously.
In the uncertain light, one of his lean white legs could be seen to disappear and then the other, one arm and then the other: a black heavier shaggier figure replaced his. For an instant, it had two heads, one light and one dark, but after a second, it pulled the dark back head over the other and corrected this. It busied itself with certain hidden fastenings and what appeared to be minor adjustments of its hide.
For a time after this, it stood very still and didn’t do anything. Then it began to growl and beat its chest; it jumped up and down and flung its arms and thrust its head forward. The growls were thin and uncertain at first but they grew louder after a second. They became low and poisonous, louder again, low and poisonous again; they stopped altogether. The figure extended its hand, clutched nothing, and shook its arm vigorously; it withdrew the arm, extended it again, clutched nothing, and shook. It repeated this four or five times. Then it picked up the pointed stick and placed it at a cocky angle under its arm and left the woods for the highway. No gorilla anywhere, Africa or California or New York, was happier than he.
A man and woman sitting close together on a rock just off the highway were looking across an open stretch of valley at a view of the city in the distance and they didn’t see the shaggy figure approaching. The smokestacks and square tops of buildings made a black uneven wall against the lighter sky and here and there a steeple cut a sharp wedge out of a cloud. The young man turned his neck just in time to see the gorilla standing a few feet away, hideous and black, with its hand extended. He eased his arm from around the woman and disappeared silently into the woods. She, as soon as she turned her eyes, fled screaming down the highway. The gorilla stood as though surprised and presently its arm fell to its side. It sat down on the rock where they had been sitting and stared over the valley at the uneven skyline of the city.
A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953)
THE GRANDMOTHER didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”
Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like a rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. “The children have been to Florida before,” the old lady said. “You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.”
The children’s mother didn’t seem to hear her but the eight-year old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?” He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
“She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day,” June Star said without raising her yellow head.
“Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?” the grandmother asked.
“I’d smack his face,” John Wesley said.
“She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.”
“All right, Miss,” the grandmother said. “Just remember that the next time you want me to curl your hair.”
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn’t intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel with a cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her. Bailey and the children’s mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the citv.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.
“Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much,” John Wesley said.
“If I were a little boy,” said the grandmother, “I wouldn’t talk about my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.”
“Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground,” John Wesley said, “and Georgia is a lousy state too.”
“You said it,” June Star said.
“In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.
“He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said.
“He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children’s mother passed him over the front seat to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island. “Look at the graveyard!” the grandmother said, pointing it out. “That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation.”
“Where’s the plantation?” John Wesley asked.
“Gone With the Wind,” said the grandmother. “Ha. Ha.”
When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star said he didn’t play fair, and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.
The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T.! This story tickled John Wesley’s funny bone and he giggled and giggled but June Star didn’t think it was any good. She said she wouldn’t marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sandwiches. The Tower was a part stucco and part wood filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY’S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED SAMMY’S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH! A VETERAN! RED SAMMY’S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey sprang back into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children jump out of the car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other and dancing space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red Sam’s wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came and took their order. The children’s mother put a dime in the machine and played “The Tennessee Waltz,” and the grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to dance but he only glared at her. He didn’t have a naturally sunny disposition like she did and trips made him nervous. The grandmother’s brown eyes were very bright. She swayed her head from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said play something she could tap to so the children’s mother put in another dime and played a fast number and June Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.
“Ain’t she cute?” Red Sam’s wife said, leaning over the counter. “Would you like to come be my little girl?”
“No I certainly wouldn’t,” June Star said. “I wouldn’t live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!” and she ran back to the table.
“Ain’t she cute?” the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” hissed the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people’s order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. “You can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win,” and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. “These days you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth?”
“People are certainly not nice like they used to be,” said the grandmother.
“Two fellers come in here last week,” Red Sammy said, “driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?”
“Because you’re a good man!” the grandmother said at once.
“Yes’m, I suppose so,” Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm. “It isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you can trust,” she said. “And I don’t count nobody out of that, not nobody,” she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
“Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that’s escaped?” asked the grandmother.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he didn’t attact this place right here,” said the woman. “If he hears about it being here, I wouldn’t be none surprised to see him. If he hears it’s two cent in the cash register, I wouldn’t be a tall surprised if he…”
“That’ll do,” Red Sam said. “Go bring these people their Co’-Colas,” and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.
“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”
He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right. The children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing. “There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were,” and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found…”
“Hey!” John Wesley said. “Let’s go sec it! We’ll find it! We’ll poke all the woodwork and find it! Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can’t we turn off there?”
“We never have seen a house with a secret panel!” June Star shrieked. “Let’s go to the house with the secret panel! Hey Pop, can’t we go see the house with the secret panel!”
“It’s not far from here, I know,” the grandmother said. “It wouldn’t take over twenty minutes.”
Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. “No,” he said.
The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel. John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother’s shoulder and whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and John Weslev kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.
“All right!” he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side or the road. “Will you all shut up? Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don’t shut up, we won’t go anywhere.”
“It would be very educational for them,” the grandmother murmured.
“All right,” Bailey said, “but get this: this is the only time we’re going to stop for anything like this. This is the one and only time.”
“The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back,” the grandmother directed. “I marked it when we passed.”
“A dirt road,” Bailey groaned.
After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother recalled other points about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.
“You can’t go inside this house,” Bailey said. “You don’t know who lives there.”
“While you all talk to the people in front, I’ll run around behind and get in a window,” John Wesley suggested.
“We’ll all stay in the car,” his mother said.
They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day’s journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them.
“This place had better turn up in a minute,” Bailey said, “or I’m going to turn around.”
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.
“It’s not much farther,” the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver’s seat with the cat-gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose-clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey’s wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the side of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children’s mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.
“But nobody’s killed,” June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to recover from the shock. They were all shakmg.
“Maybe a car will come along,” said the children’s mother hoarsely.
“I believe I have injured an organ,” said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one answered her. Bailey’s teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed in it and his face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearselike automobile. There were three men in it.
It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a steady expressionless gaze to where they were sitting, and didn’t speak. Then he turned his head and muttered something to the other two and they got alit. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. He came around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had guns.
“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was. He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn’t slip. He had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I see you all had you a little spill.”
“We turned over twice!” said the grandmother.
“Oncet,” he corrected. “We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram,” he said quietly to the boy with the gray hat.
“What you got that gun for?” John Wesley: asked. “Whatcha gonna do with that gun?”
“Lady,” the man said to the children’s mother, “would you mind calling them children to sit down by you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down quiet together there where you’re at.”
“What are you telling US what to do for?” June Star asked.
Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.
“Come here,” said their mother.
“Look here now,” Bailey began suddenly, “we’re in a predicament! We’re in…”
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. “You’re The Misfit!” she said. “I recognized you at once!”
“Yes’m,” the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, “but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.”
Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children. The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.
“Lady,” he said, “don’t you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don’t mean. I don’t reckon he meant to talk to you thataway.”
“You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up again. “I would hate to have to,” he said.
“Listen,” the grandmother almost screamed, “I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!”
“Yes mam,” he said, “finest people in the world.” When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth. “God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold,” he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit squatted down on the ground. “Watch them children, Bobby Lee,” he said. “You know they make me nervous.” He looked at the six of them huddled together in front of him and he seemed to be embarrassed as if he couldn’t think of anything to say. “Ain’t a cloud in the sky,” he remarked, looking up at it. “Don’t see no sun but don’t see no cloud neither.”
“Yes, it’s a beautiful day,” said the grandmother. “Listen,” she said, “you shouldn’t call yourself The Misfit because I know you’re a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell.”
“Hush!” Bailey yelled. “Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!” He was squatting in the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn’t move.
“I prechate that, lady,” The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt of his gun.
“It’ll take a half a hour to fix this here car,” Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of it.
“Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you,” The Misfit said, pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. “The boys want to ast you something,” he said to Bailey. “Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with them?”
“Listen,” Bailey began, “we’re in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is,” and his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground. Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught hold of his father’s hand and Bobby Lee followed. They went off toward the woods and just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, “I’ll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!”
“Come back this instant!” his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.
“Bailey Boy!” the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at The Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her. “I just know you’re a good man,” she said desperately. “You’re not a bit common!”
“Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The Misfit said after a second as if he had considered her statement carefully, “but I ain’t the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!’” He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. “I’m sorry I don’t have on a shirt before you ladies,” he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. “We buried our clothes that we had on when we escaped and we’re just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks we met,” he explained.
“That’s perfectly all right,” the grandmother said. “Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his suitcase.”
“I’ll look and see terrectly,” The Misfit said.
“Where are they taking him?” the children’s mother screamed.
“Daddy was a card himself,” The Misfit said. “You couldn’t put anything over on him. He never got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them.”
“You could be honest too if you’d only try,” said the grandmother. “Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time.”
The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it. “Yes’m, somebody is always after you,” he murmured.
The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind his hat because she was standing up looking down on him. “Do you ever pray?” she asked.
He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. “Nome,” he said.
There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady’s head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath. “Bailey Boy!” she called.
“I was a gospel singer for a while,” The Misfit said. “I been most everything. Been in the arm service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet,” and looked up at the children’s mother and the little girl who were sitting close together, their faces white and their eyes glassy; “I even seen a woman flogged,” he said.
“Pray, pray,” the grandmother began, “pray, pray…”
“I never was a bad boy that I remember of,” The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, “but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive,” and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.
“That’s when you should have started to pray,” she said. “What did you do to get sent to the penitentiary that first time?”
“Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.”
“Maybe they put you in by mistake,” the old lady said vaguely.
“Nome,” he said. “It wasn’t no mistake. They had the papers on me.”
“You must have stolen something,” she said.
The Misfit sneered slightly. “Nobody had nothing I wanted,” he said. “It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself.”
“If you would pray,” the old lady said, “Jesus would help you.”
“That’s right,” The Misfit said.
“Well then, why don’t you pray?” she asked trembling with delight suddenly.
“I don’t want no hep,” he said. ‘
“I’m doing all right by myself.”
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it.
“Thaw me that shirt, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him and landed on his shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn’t name what the shirt reminded her of. “No, lady,” The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, “I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do an another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”
The children’s mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn’t get her breath. “Lady,” he asked, “would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your husband?”
“Yes, thank you,” the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was holding the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. “Hep that lady up, Hiram,” The Misfit said as she struggled to climb out of the ditch, “and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl’s hand.”
“I don’t want to hold hands with him,” June Star said. “He reminds me of a pig.”
The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and pulled her off into the woods after Hiram and her mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the skv nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus, Jesus,” meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.
“Yes’m,” The Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course” he said, “they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. “I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”
There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. “Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?’
“Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got.”
“Lady,” The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, “there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.”
There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead.” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throwaway everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
“Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit’s eyes were red rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. “Take her off and throw her where you thrown the others,” he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg.
“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
A Late Encounter with the Enemy (1953)
GENERAL SASH was a hundred and four years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from college. The General didn’t give two slaps for her graduation but he never doubted he would live for it. Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition. A graduation exercise was not exactly his idea of a good time, even if, as she said, he would be expected to sit on the stage in his uniform. She said there would be a long procession of teachers and students in their robes but that there wouldn’t be anything to equal him in his uniform. He knew this well enough without her telling him, and as for the damn procession, it could march to hell and back and not cause him a quiver. He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn’t have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers as about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. However, he was willing to sit on the stage in his uniform so that they could see him.
Sally Poker was not as sure as he was that he would live until her graduation. There had not been any perceptible change in him for the last five years, but she had the sense that she might be cheated out of her triumph because she so often was. She had been going to summer school every year for the past twenty because when she started teaching, there were no such things as degrees. In those times, she said, everything was normal but nothing had been normal since she was sixteen, and for the past twenty summers, when she should have been resting, she had had to take a trunk in the burning heat to the state teacher’s college; and though when she returned in the fall, she always taught in the exact way she had been taught not to teach, this was a mild revenge that didn’t satisfy her sense of justice. She wanted the General at her graduation because she wanted to show what she stood for, or, as she said, “what all was behind her,” and was not behind them. This them was not anybody in particular. It was just all the upstarts who had turned the world on its head and unsettled the ways of decent living.
She meant to stand on that platform in August with the General sitting in his wheel chair on the stage behind her and she meant to hold her head very high as if she were saying, “See him! See him! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage! See him!” One night in her sleep she screamed, “See him! See him!” and turned her head and found him sitting in his wheel chair behind her with a terrible expression on his face and with all his clothes off except the general’s hat and she had waked up and had not dared to go back to sleep again that night.
For his part, the General would not have consented even to attend her graduation if she had not promised to see to it that he sit on the stage. He liked to sit on any stage. He considered that he was still a very handsome man. When he had been able to stand up, he had measured five feet four inches of pure game cock. He had white hair that reached to his shoulders behind and he would not wear teeth because he thought his profile was more striking without them. When he put on his full-dress general’s uniform, he knew well enough that there was nothing to match him anywhere.
This was not the same uniform he had worn in the War between the States. He had not actually been a general in that war. He had probably been a foot soldier; he didn’t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn’t remember that war at all. It was like his feet, which hung down now shriveled at the very end of him, without feeling, covered with a blue-gray afghan that Sally Poker had crocheted when she was a little girl. He didn’t remember the Spanish-American War in which he had lost a son; he didn’t even remember the son. He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades. People were always asking him if he remembered this or thata dreary black procession of questions about the past. There was only one event in the past that had any significance for him and that he cared to talk about: that was twelve years ago when he had received the general’s uniform and had been in the premiere.
“I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta,” he would tell visitors sitting on his front porch. “Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn’t a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. It was a nashnul event and they had me in it—up onto the stage. There was no bob-tails at it. Every person at it had paid ten dollars to get in and had to wear his tuxseeder. I was in this uniform. A beautiful gul presented me with it that afternoon in a hotel room.”
“It was in a suite in the hotel and I was in it too, Papa,” Sally Poker would say, winking at the visitors. “You weren’t alone with any young lady in a hotel room.”
“Was, I’d a known what to do,” the old General would say with a sharp look and the visitors would scream with laughter. “This was a Hollywood, California, gul,” he’d continue. “She was from Hollywood, California, and didn’t have any part in the pitcher. Out there they have so many beautiful guls that they don’t need that they call them a extra and they don’t use them for nothing but presenting people with things and having their pitchers taken. They took my pitcher with her. No, it was two of them. One on either side and me in the middle with my arms around each of them’s waist and their waist ain’t any bigger than a half a dollar.”
Sally Poker would interrupt again. “It was Mr. Govisky that gave you the uniform, Papa, and he gave me the most exquisite corsage. Really, I wish you could have seen it. It was made with gladiola petals taken off and painted gold and put back together to look like a rose. It was exquisite. I wish you could have seen it, it was…”
“It was as big as her head,” the General would snarl. “I was tellin it. They gimme this uniform and they gimme this seward and they say, “‘Now General, we don’t want you to start a war on us. All we want you to do is march right up on that stage when you’re innerduced tonight and answer a few questions. Think you can do that?’ ‘Think I can do it!’ I say. ‘Listen here. I was doing things before you were born,’ and they hollered.”
“He was the hit of the show,” Sally Poker would say, but she didn’t much like to remember the premiere on account of what had happened to her feet at it. She had bought a new dress for the occasiona long black crepe dinner dress with a rhinestone buckle and a bolero—and a pair of silver slippers to wear with it, because she was supposed to go up on the stage with him to keep him from falling. Everything was arranged for them. A real limousine came at ten minutes to eight and took them to the theater. It drew up under the marquee at exactly the right time, after the big stars and the director and the author and the governor and the mayor and some less important stars. The police kept traffic from jamming and there were ropes to keep the people off who couldn’t go. All the people who couldn’t go watched them step out of the limousine into the lights. Then they walked down the red and gold foyer and an usherette in a Confederate cap and little short skirt conducted them to their special seats. The audience was already there and a group of UDC members began to clap when they saw the General in his uniform and that started everybody to clap. A few more celebrities came after them and then the doors closed and the lights went down.
A young man with blond wavy hair who said he represented the motion-picture industry came out and began to introduce everybody and each one who was introduced walked up on the stage and said how really happy he was to be here for this great event. The General and his granddaughter were introduced sixteenth on the program. He was introduced as General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy, though Sally Poker had told Mr. Govisky that his name was George Poker Sash and that he had only been a major. She helped him up from his seat but her heart was beating so fast she didn’t know whether she’d make it herself.
The old man walked up the aisle slowly with his fierce white head high and his hat held over his heart. The orchestra began to play the Confederate Battle Hymn very softly and the UOC members rose as a group and did not sit down again until the General was on the stage. When he reached the center of the stage with Sally Poker just behind him guiding his elbow, the orchestra burst out in a loud rendition of the Battle Hymn and the old man, with real stage presence, gave a vigorous trembling salute and stood at attention until the last blast had died away. Two of the usherettes in Confederate caps and short skirts held a Confederate and a Union flag crossed behind them.
The General stood in the exact center of the spotlight and it caught a weird moon-shaped slice of Sally Poker—the corsage, the rhinestone buckle and one hand clenched around a white glove and handkerchief. The young man with the blond wavy hair inserted himself into the circle of light and said he was really happy to have here tonight for this great event, one, he said, who had fought and bled in the battles they would soon see daringly reacted on the screen, and “Tell me, General,” he asked, “how old are you?”
“Niiiiiinnttty-two!” the General screamed.
The young man looked as if this were just about the most impressive thing that had been said all evening. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “let’s give the General the biggest hand we’ve got!” and there was applause immediately and the young man indicated to Sally Poker with a motion of his thumb that she could take the old man back to his seat now so that the next person could be introduced; but the General had not finished. He stood immovable in the exact center of the spotlight, his neck thrust forward, his mouth slightly open, and his voracious gray eyes drinking in the glare and the applause. He elbowed his granddaughter roughly away. “How I keep so young,” he screeched, “I kiss all the pretty guls!”
This was met with a great din of spontaneous applause and it was at just that instant that Sally Poker looked down at her feet and discovered that in the excitement of getting ready she had forgotten to change her shoes: two brown Girl Scout oxfords protruded from the bottom of her dress. She gave the General a yank and almost ran with him off the stage. He was very angry that he had not got to say how glad he was to be here for this event and on the way back to his seat, he kept saying as loud as he could, “I’m glad to be here at this preemy with all these beautiful guls!” but there was another celebrity going up the other aisle and nobody paid any attention to him. He slept through the picture, muttering fiercely every now and then in his sleep.
Since then, his life had not been very interesting. His feet were completely dead now, his knees worked like old hinges, his kidneys functioned when they would, but his heart persisted doggedly to beat. The past and the future were the same thing to him, one forgotten and the other not remembered; he had no more notion of dying than a cat. Every year on Confederate Memorial Day, he was bundled up and lent to the Capitol City Museum where he was displayed from one to four in a musty room full of old photographs, old uniforms, old artillery, and historic documents. All these were carefully preserved in glass cases so that children would not put their hands on them. He wore his general’s uniform from the premiere and sat, with a fixed scowl, inside a small roped area. There was nothing about him to indicate that he was alive except an occasional movement in his milky gray eyes, but once when a bold child touched his sword, his arm shot forward and slapped the hand off in an instant. In the spring when the old homes were opened for pilgrimages, he was invited to wear his uniform and sit in some conspicuous spot and lend atmosphere to the scene. Some of these times he only snarled at the visitors but sometimes he told about the premiere and the beautiful girls.
If he had died before Sally Poker’s graduation, she thought she would have died herself. At the beginning of the summer term, even before she knew if she would pass, she told the Dean that her grandfather, General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy, would attend her graduation and that he was a hundred and four years old and that his mind was still clear as a bell. Distinguished visitors were always welcome and could sit on the stage and be introduced. She made arrangements with her nephew, John Wesley Poker Sash, a Boy Scout, to come wheel the General’s chair. She thought how sweet it would be to see the old man in his courageous gray and the young boy in his clean khaki—the old and the new, she thought appropriately—they would be behind her on the stage when she received her degree.
Everything went almost exactly as she had planned. In the summer while she was away at school, the General stayed with other relatives and they brought him and John Wesley, the Boy Scout, down to the graduation. A reporter came to the hotel where they stayed and took the General’s picture with Sally Poker on one side of him and John Wesley on the other. The General, who had had his picture taken with beautiful girls, didn’t think much of this. He had forgotten precisely what kind of event this was he was going to attend but he remembered that he was to wear his uniform and carry the sword.
On the morning of the graduation, Sally Poker had to line up in the academic procession with the B. S.’s in Elementary Education and she couldn’t see to getting him on the stage herself, but John Wesley, a fat blond boy of ten with an executive expression, guaranteed to take care of everything. She came in her academic gown to the hotel and dressed the old man in his uniform. He was as frail as a dried spider. “Aren’t you just thrilled, Papa?” she asked. “I’m just thrilled to death!”
“Put the soward acrost my lap, damm you,” the old man said, “where it’ll shine.”
She put it there and then stood back looking at him. “You look just grand,” she said.
“God damm it,” the old man said in a slow monotonous certain tone as if he were saying it to the beating ot his heart. “God damm every god dam thing to hell.”
“Now, now,” she said and left happily to join the procession.
The graduates were lined up behind the Science building and she found her place just as the line started to move. She had not slept much the night before and when she had, she had dreamed of the exercises, murmuring, “See him, see him?” in her sleep but waking up every time just before she turned her head to look at him behind her. The graduates had to walk three blocks in the hot sun in their black wool robes and as she plodded stolidly along she thought that if anyone considered this academic procession something impressive to behold, they need only wait until they saw that old General in his courageous gray and that clean young Boy Scout stoutly wheeling his chair across the stage with the sunlight catching the sword. She imagined that John Wesley had the old man ready now behind the stage.
The black procession wound its way up the two blocks and started on the main walk leading to the auditorium. The visitors stood on the grass, picking out their graduates. Men were pushing back their hats and wiping their foreheads and women were lifting their dresses slightly from the shoulders to keep them from sticking to their backs. The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them. The sun blazed off the fenders of automobiles and beat from the columns of the buildings and pulled the eye from one spot of glare to another. It pulled Sally Poker’s toward the big red Coca-Cola machine that had been set up by the side of the auditorium. Here she saw the General parked, scowling and hatless in his chair in the blazing sun while John Wesley, his blouse loose behind, his hip and cheek pressed to the red machine, was drinking a Coca-Cola. She broke from the line and galloped to them and snatched the bottle away. She shook the boy and thrust in his blouse and put the hat on the old man’s head. “Now get him in there!” she said, pointing one rigid finger to the side door of the building.
For his part the General felt as if there were a little hole beginning to widen in the top of his head. The boy wheeled him rapidly down a walk and up a ramp and into a building and bumped him over the stage entrance and into position where he had been told and the General glared in front of him at heads that all seemed to flow together and eyes that moved from one face to another. Several figures in black robes came and picked up his hand and shook it. A black procession was flowing up each aisle and forming to stately music in a pool in front of him. The music seemed to be entering his head through the little hole and he thought for a second that the procession would try to enter it too.
He didn’t know what procession this was but there was something familiar about it. It must be familiar to him since it had come to meet him, but he didn’t like a black procession. Any procession that came to meet him, he thought irritably, ought to have floats with beautiful guls on them like the floats before the preemy. It must be something connected with history like they were always having. He had no use for any of it. What happened then wasn’t anything to a man living now and he was living now.
When all the procession had flowed into the black pool, a black figure began orating in front of it. The figure was telling something about history and the General made up his mind he wouldn’t listen, but the words kept seeping in through the little hole in his head. He heard his own name mentioned and his chair was shuttled forward roughly and the Boy Scout took a big bow. They called his name and the fat brat bowed. Goddam you, the old man tried to say, get out of my way, I can stand up—but he was jerked back again before he could get up and take the bow. He supposed the noise they made was for him. If he was over, he didn’t intend to listen to any more of it. If it hadn’t been for the little hole in the top of his head, none of the words would have got to him. He thought of putting his finger up there into the hole to block them but the hole was a little wider than his finger and it felt as if it were getting deeper.
Another black robe had taken the place of the first one and was talking now and he heard his name mentioned again but they were not talking about him, they were still talking about history. “If we forget our past,” the speaker was saying, “we won’t remember our future and it will be as well for we wont have one.” The General heard some of these words gradually. He had forgotten history and he didn’t intend to remember it again. He had forgotten the name and face of his wife and the names and faces of his children or even if he had a wife and children, and he had forgotten the names of places and the places themselves and what had happened at them.
He was considerably irked by the hole in his head. He had not expected to have a hole in his head at this event. It was the slow black music that had put it there and though most of the music had stopped outside, there was still a little of it in the hole, going deeper and moving around in his thoughts, letting the words he heard into the dark places of his brain. He heard the words, Chickamauga, Shiloh, Johnston, Lee, and he knew he was inspiring all these words that meant nothing to him. He wondered if he had been a general at Chickamauga or at Lee. Then he tried to see himself and the horse mounted in the middle of a float full of beautiful girls, being driven slowly through downtown Atlanta. Instead, the old words began to stir in his head as if they were trying to wrench themselves out of place and come to life.
The speaker was through with that war and had gone on to the next one and now he was approaching another and all his words, like the black procession, were vaguely familiar and irritating. There was a long finger of music in the General’s head, probing various Spots that were words, letting in a little light on the words and helping them to live. The words began to come toward him and he said, Dammit! I ain’t going to have it! and he started edging backwards to get out of the way. Then he saw the figure in the black robe sit down and there was a noise and the black pool in front of him began to rumble and to How toward him from either side to the black slow music, and he said, Stop darmmit! I can’t do but one thing at a time! He couldn’t protect himself from the words and attend to the procession too and the words were coming at him fast. He felt that he was running backwards and the words were coming at him like musket fire, just escaping him but getting nearer and nearer. He turned around and began to run as fast as he could but he found himself running toward the words. He was running into a regular volley of them and meeting them with quick curses. As the music swelled toward him, the entire past opened up on him out of nowhere and he felt his body riddled in a hundred places with sharp stabs of pain and he fell down, returning a curse for every hit. He saw his wife’s narrow face looking at him critically through her round gold-rimmed glasses; he saw one of his squinting baldheaded sons; and his mother ran toward him with an anxious look; then a succession of places—Chicka_ mauga, Shiloh, Marthasville—rushed at him as if the past were the only future now and he had to endure it. Then suddenly he saw that the black procession was almost on him. He recognized it, for it had been dogging all his days. He made such a desperate effort to see over it and find out what comes after the past that his hand clenched the sword until the blade touched bone.
The graduates were crossing the stage in a long file to receive their scrolls and shake the president’s hand. As Sally Poker, who was near the end, crossed, she glanced at the General and saw him sitting fixed and fierce, his eyes wide open, and she turned her head forward again and held it a perceptible degree higher and received her scroll. Once it was all over and she was out of the auditorium in the sun again, she located her kin and they waited together on a bench in the shade for John Wesley to wheel the old man out. That crafty scout had bumped him out the back way and rolled him at high speed down a flagstone path and was waiting now, with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own (1953)
THE old woman and her daughter were sitting on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time. The old woman slid to the edge of her chair and leaned forward, shading her eyes from the piercing sunset with her hand. The daughter could not see far in front of her and continued to play with her fingers. Although the old woman lived in this desolate spot with only her daughter and she had never seen Mr. Shiftlet before, she could tell, even from a distance, that he was a tramp and no one to be afraid of. His left coat sleeve was folded up to show there was only half an arm in it and his gaunt figure listed slightly to the side as if the breeze were pushing him. He had on a black town suit and a brown felt hat that was turned up ill the front and down in the back and he carried a till tool box by a handle. He came on, at an amble, up her road, his bee turned toward the sun which appeared to be balancing itself on the peak of a small mountain.
The old woman didn’t change her position until he was almost into her yard; then she rose with one hand fisted on her hip. The daughter, a large girl in a short blue organdy dress, saw him all at once and jumped up and began to stamp and point and make excited speechless sounds.
Mr. Shiftlet stopped just inside the yard and set his box on the ground and tipped his hat at her as if she were not in the least afflicted; then he turned toward the old woman and swung the hat all the way off. He had long black slick hair that hung flat from a part in the middle to beyond the tips of his ears on either side. His face descended in forehead for more than half its length and ended suddenly with his features just balanced over a jutting steeltrap jaw. He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.
“Good evening,” the old woman said. She was about the size of a cedar fence post and she had a man’s gray hat pulled down low over her head.
The tramp stood looking at her and didn’t answer. He turned his back and faced the sunset. He swung both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross. The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists. She had long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.
He held the pose for almost fifty seconds and then he picked up his box and came on to the porch and dropped down on the bottom step. “Lady,” he said in a firm nasal voice, “I’d give a fortune to live where I could see me a sun do that every evening.”
“Does it every evening,” the old woman said and sat back down. The daughter sat down too and watched him with a cautious sly look as if he were a bird that had come up very close. He leaned to one side, rooting in his pants pocket, and in a second he brought out a package of chewing gum and offered her a piece. She took it and un peeled it and began to chew without taking her eyes off him. He offered the old woman a piece but she only raised her upper lip to indicate she had no teeth.
Mr. Shiftlet’s pale sharp glance had already passed over everything in the yard—the pump near the corner of the house and the big fig tree that three or four chickens were preparing to roost in—and had moved to a shed where he saw the square rusted back of an automobile. “You ladies drive?” he asked.
“That car ain’t run in fifteen year,” the old woman said. “The day my husband died, it quit running.”
“Nothing is like it used to be, lady,” he said. “The world is almost rotten.”
“That’s right,” the old woman said. “You from around here?”
“Name Tom T. Shiftlet,” he murmured, looking at the tires.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” the old woman said. “Name Lucynell Crater and daughter Lucynell Crater. What you doing around here, Mr. Shiftlet?”
He judged the car to be about a 1928 or ‘29 Ford. “Lady,” he said, and turned and gave her his full attention, “lemme tell you something. There’s one of these doctors in Atlanta that’s taken a knife and cut the human heart—the human heart,” he repeated, leaning forward, “out of a man’s chest and held it in his hand,” and he held his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart, “and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady,” he said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay-colored eyes brightened, “he don’t know no more about it than you or me.”
“That’s right,” the old woman said.
“Why, if he was to take that knife and cut into every corner of it, he still wouldn’t know no more than you or me. What you want to bet?”
“Nothing,” the old woman said wisely. “Where you come from, Mr. ShiftIet?”
He didn’t answer. He reached into his pocket and brought out a sack of tobacco and a package of cigarette papers and rolled himself a cigarette, expertly with one hand, and attached it in a hanging position to his upper lip. Then he took a box of wooden matches from his pocket and struck one on his shoe. He held the burning match as if he were studying the mystery of flame while it traveled dangerously toward his skin. The daughter began to make loud noises and to point to his hand and shake her finger at him, but when the flame was just before touching him, he leaned down with his hand cupped over it as if he were going to set fire to his nose and lit the cigarette.
He flipped away the dead match and blew a stream of gray into the evening. A sly look came over his face. “Lady,” he said, “nowadays, people’ll do anything anyways. I can tell you my name is Tom T. ShiftIet and I come from Tarwater, Tennessee, but you never have seen me before: how you know I ain’t lying? How you know my name ain’t Aaron Sparks, lady, and I come from Singleberry, Georgia, or how you know it’s not George Speeds and I come from Lucy, Alabama, or how you know I ain’t Thompson Bright from Toolafalls, Mississippi?”
“I don’t know nothing about you,” the old woman muttered, irked.
“Lady,” he said, “people don’t care how they lie. Maybe the best I can tell you is, I’m a man; but listen lady,” he said and paused and made his tone more ominous still, “what is a man?”
The old woman began to gum a seed. “What you carry in that tin box, Mr. ShiftIet?” she asked.
“Tools,” he said, “put back. I’m a carpenter.”
“Well, if you come out here to work, I’ll be able to feed you and give you a place to sleep but I can’t pay. I’ll tell you that before you begin,” she said.
There was no answer at once and no particular expression on his face. He leaned back against the two-by-four that helped support the porch roof. “Lady,” he said slowly, “there’s some men that some things mean more to them than money.” The old woman rocked without comment and the daughter watched the trigger that moved up and down in his neck. He told the old woman then that all most people were interested in was money, but he asked what a man was made for. He asked her if a man was made for money, or what. He asked her what she thought she was made for but she didn’t answer, she only sat rocking and wondered if a one-armed man could put a new roof on her garden house. He asked a lot of questions that she didn’t answer. He told her that he was twenty-eight years old and had lived a varied life. He had been a gospel singer, a foreman on the railroad, an assistant in an undertaking parlor, and he come over the radio for three months with Uncle Roy and his Red Creek Wranglers. He said he had fought and bled in the Arm Service of his country and visited every foreign land and that everywhere he had seen people that didn’t care if they did a thing one way or another. He said he hadn’t been raised thataway.
A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.
“Are you married or are you single?” the old woman asked.
There was a long silence. “Lady,” he asked finally, “where would you find you an innocent woman today? I wouldn’t have any of this trash I could just pick up.”
The daughter was leaning very far down, hanging her head almost between her knees watching him through a triangular door she had made in her overturned hair; and she suddenly fell in a heap on the floor and began to whimper. Mr. Shiftlet straightened her out and helped her get back in the chair.
“Is she your baby girl?” he asked.
“My only,” the old woman said “and she’s the sweetest girl in the world. I would give her up for nothing on earth. She’s smart too. She can sweep the floor, cook, wash, feed the chickens, and hoe. I wouldn’t give her up for a casket of jewels.”
“No,” he said kindly, “don’t ever let any man take her away from you.”
“Any man come after her,” the old woman said, “‘ll have to stay around the place.”
Mr. Shiftlet’s eye in the darkness was focused on a part of the automobile bumper that glittered in the distance. “Lady,” he said, jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house and yard and pump, “there ain’t a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn’t fix for you, one-arm jackleg or not. I’m a man,” he said with a sullen dignity, “even if I ain’t a whole one. I got,” he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to say, “a moral intelligence!” and his face pierced out of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.
The old woman was not impressed with the phrase. “I told you you could hang around and work for food,” she said, “if you don’t mind sleeping in that car yonder.”
“Why listen, lady,” he said with a grin of delight, “the monks of old slept in their coffins!”
“They wasn’t as advanced as we are,” the old woman said.
The next morning he began on the roof of the garden house while Lucynell, the daughter, sat on a rock and watched him work. He had not been around a week before the change he had made in the place was apparent. He had patched the front and back steps, built a new hog pen, restored a fence, and taught Lucynell, who was completely deaf and had never said a word in her life, to say the word “bird.” The big rosy-faced girl followed him everywhere, saying “Burrttddt ddbirrrttdt,” and clapping her hands. The old woman watched from a distance, secretly pleased. She was ravenous for a son-in-law.
Mr. Shiftlet slept on the hard narrow back seat of the car with his feet out the side window. He had his razor and a can of water on a crate that served him as a bedside table and he put up a piece of mirror against the back glass and kept his coat neatly on a hanger that he hung over one of the windows.
In the evenings he sat on the steps and talked while the old woman and Lucynell rocked violently in their chairs on either side of him. The old woman’s three mountains were black against the dark blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and by the moon after it had left the chickens. Mr. Shiftlet pointed out that the reason he had improved this plantation was because he had taken a personal interest in it. He said he was even going to make the automobile run.
He had raised the hood and studied the mechanism and he said he could tell that the car had been built in the days when cars were really built. You take now, he said, one man puts in one bolt and another man puts in another bolt and another man puts in another bolt so that it’s a man for a bolt. That’s why you have to pay so much for a car: you’re paying all those men. Now if you didn’t have to pay but one man, you could get you a cheaper car and one that had had a personal interest taken in it, and it would be a better car. The old woman agreed with him that this was so.
Mr. Shiftlet said that the trouble with the world was that nobody cared, or stopped and took any trouble. He said he never would have been able to teach Lucynell to say a word if he hadn’t cared and stopped long enough.
“Teach her to say something else,” the old woman said.
“What you want her to say next?” Mr. Shiftlet asked.
The old woman’s smile was broad and toothless and suggestive. “Teach her to say ‘sugarpie,’” she said.
Mr. Shiftlet already knew what was on her mind.
The next day he began to tinker with the automobile and that evening he told her that if she would buy a fan belt, he would be able to make the car run.
The old woman said she would give him the money. “You see that girl yonder?” she asked, pointing to Lucynell who was sitting on the floor a foot away, watching him, her eyes blue even in the dark. “If it was ever a man wanted to take her away, I would say, ‘No man on earth is going to take that sweet girl of mine away from me!’ but if he was to say, ‘Lady, I don’t want to take her away, I want her right here,’ I would say. ‘Mister, I don’t blame you none. I wouldn’t pass up a chance to live in a permanent place and get the sweetest girl in the world myself. You ain’t no fool, I would say.”
“How old is she?” Mr. Shiftlet asked casually.
“Fifteen, sixteen,” the old woman said. The girl was nearly thirty but because of her innocence it was impossible to guess.
“It would be a good idea to paint it too,” Mr. Shiftlet remarked.
“You don’t want it to rust out.”
“We’ll see about that later,” the old woman said.
The next day he walked into town and returned with the parts he needed and a can of gasoline. Late in the afternoon, terrible noises issued from the shed and the old woman rushed out of the house, thinking Lucynell was somewhere having a fit. Lucynell was sitting on a chicken crate, stamping her feet and screaming, “Burrddttt! bddurrddtttt!” but her fuss was drowned out by the car. With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver’s seat, sitting very erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead.
That night, rocking on the porch, the old woman began her business, at once. “You want you an innocent woman, don’t you?” she asked sympathetically. “You don’t want none of this trash.”
“No’m, I don’t,” Mr. Shiftlet said.
“One that can’t talk,” she continued, “can’t sass you back or use foul language. That’s the kind for you to have. Right there,” and she pointed to Lucynell sitting crosslegged in her chair, holding both feet in her hands.
“That’s right,” he admitted. “She wouldn’t give me any trouble.”
“Saturday,” the old woman said, “you and her and me can drive into town and get married.”
Mr. Shiftlet eased his position on the steps.
“I can’t get married right now,” he said. “Everything you want to do takes money and I ain’t got any.”
“What you need with money?” she asked.
“It takes money,” he said. “Some people’Il do anything anyhow these days, but the way I think, I wouldn’t marry no woman that I couldn’t take on a trip like she was somebody. I mean take her to a hotel and treat her. I wouldn’t marry the Duchesser Windsor,” he said firmly, “unless I could take her to a hotel and giver something good to eat.
“I was raised thataway and there ain’t a thing I can do about it. My old mother taught me how to do.”
“Lucynell don’t even know what a hotel is,” the old woman muttered. “Listen here, Mr. Shiftlet,” she said, sliding forward in her chair, “you’d be getting a permanent house and a deep well and the most innocent girl in the world. You don’t need no money. Lemme tell you something: there ain’t any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man.”
The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree. He didn’t answer at once. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it and then he said in an even voice, “Lady, a man is divided into two parts, body and spirit.”
The old woman clamped her gums together.
“A body and a spirit,” he repeated. “The body, lady, is like a house: it don’t go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always…”
“Listen, Mr. Shiftlet,” she said, “my well never goes dry and my house is always warm in the winter and there’s no mortgage on a thing about this place. You can go to the courthouse and see for yourself. And yonder under that shed is a fine automobile.” She laid the bait carefully. “You can have it painted by Saturday. I’ll pay for the paint.”
In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire. After a second he recalled himself and said, “I’m only saying a man’s spirit means more to him than anything else. I would have to take my wife off for the weekend without no regards at all for cost. I got to follow where my spirit says to go.”
“I’ll give you fifteen dollars for a weekend trip,” the old woman said in a crabbed voice. “That’s the best I can do.”
“That wouldn’t hardly pay for more than the gas and the hotel,” he said. “It wouldn’t feed her.”
“Seventeen-fifty,” the old woman said. “That’s all I got so it isn’t any use you trying to milk me. You can take a lunch.”
Mr. ShiftIet was deeply hurt by the word “milk.” He didn’t doubt that she had more money sewed up in her mattress but he had already told her he was not interested in her money. “I’ll make that do,” he said and rose and walked off without treating with her further.
On Saturday the three of them drove into town in the car that the paint had barely dried on and Mr. ShiftIet and Lucynell were married in the Ordinary’s office while the old woman witnessed. As they came out of the courthouse, Mr. ShiftIet began twisting his neck in his collar. He looked morose and bitter as if he had been insulted while someone held him. “That didn’t satisfy me none,” he said. “That was just something a woman in an office did, nothing but paper work and blood tests. What do they know about my blood? If they was to take my heart and cut it out,” he said, “they wouldn’t know a thing about me. It didn’t satisfy me at all.”
“It satisfied the law,” the old woman said sharply.
“The law,” Mr. ShiftIet said and spit. “It’s the law that don’t satisfy me.”
He had painted the car dark green with a yellow band around it just under the windows. The three of them climbed in the front seat and the old woman said, “Don’t Lucynell look pretty? Looks like a baby doll.” Lucynell was dressed lip in a white dress that her mother had uprooted from a trunk and there was a Panama hat on her head with a bunch of red wooden cherries on the brim. Every now and then her placid expression was changed by a sly isolated little thought like a shoot of green in the desert. “You got a prize!” the old woman said.
Mr. ShiftIet didn’t even look at her.
They drove back to the house to let the old woman off and pick up the lunch. When they were ready to leave, she stood staring in the window of the car, with her fingers clenched around the glass. Tears began to seep sideways out of her eyes and run along the dirty creases in her face. “I ain’t ever been parted with her for two days before,” she said.
Mr. Shiftlet started the motor.
“And I wouldn’t let no man have her but you because I seen you would do right. Good-by, Sugarbaby,” she said, clutching at the sleeve of the white dress. Lucynell looked straight at her and didn’t seem to see her there at all. Mr. ShiftIet eased the car forward so that she had to move her hands.
The early afternoon was clear and open and surrounded by pale blue sky. Although the car would go only thirty miles an hour, Mr. Shiftlet imagined a terrific climb and dip and swerve that went entirely to his head so that he forgot his morning bitterness. He had always wanted an automobile but he had never been able to afford one before. He drove very fast because he wanted to make Mobile by nightfall.
Occasionally he stopped his thoughts long enough to look at Lucynell in the seat beside him. She had eaten the lunch as soon as they were out of the yard and now she was pulling the cherries off the hat one by one and throwing them out the window. He became depressed in spite of the car. He had driven about a hundred miles when he decided that she must be hungry again and at the next small town they came to, he stopped in front of an aluminum-painted eating place called The Hot Spot and took her in and ordered her a plate of ham and grits. The ride had made her sleepy and as soon as she got up on the stool, she rested her head on the counter and shut her eyes. There was no one in The Hot Spot but Mr. Shiftlet and the boy behind the counter, a pale youth with a greasy rag hung over his shoulder. Before he could dish up the food, she was snoring gently.
“Give it to her when she wakes up,” Mr. ShiftIet said. “I’ll pay for it now.”
The boy bent over her and stared at the long pink-gold hair and the half-shut sleeping eyes. Then he looked up and stared at Mr. Shiftlet. “She looks like an angel of Cawd,” he murmured.
“Hitchhiker,” Mr. Shiflet explained. “I can’t wait. I got to make Tuscaloosa.”
The boy bent over again and very carefully touched his finger to a strand of the golden hair and Mr. Shiftlet left.
He was more depressed than ever as he drove on by himself. The late afternoon had grown hot and sultry and the country had flattened out. Deep in the sky a storm was preparing very slowly and without thunder as if it meant to drain every drop of air from the earth before it broke. There were times when Mr. Shiftiet preferred not to be alone. He felt too that a man with a car had a responsibility to others and he kept his eye out for a hitchhiker. Occasionally he saw a sign that warned: “Drive carefully. The life you save may be your own.”
The narrow road dropped off on either side into dry fields and here and there a shack or a filling station stood in a clearing. The sun began to set directly in front of the automobile. It was a reddening ball that through his windshield was slightly flat on the bottom and top. He saw a boy in overalls and a gray hat standing on the edge of the road and he slowed the car down and stopped in front of him. The boy didn’t have his hand raised to thumb the ride, he was only standing there, but he had a small cardboard suitcase and his hat was set on his head in a way to indicate that he had left somewhere for good. “Son,” Mr. Shiftlet said, “I see you want a ride.”
The boy didn’t say he did or he didn’t but he opened the door of the car and got in, and Mr. Shiftlet started driving again. The child held the suitcase on his lap and folded his arms on top of it. He turned his head and looked out the window away from Mr. Shiftlet. Mr. Shiftlet felt oppressed. “Son,” he said after a minute, “I got the best old mother in the world so I reckon you only got the second best.”
The boy gave him a quick dark glance and then turned his face back out the window.
“It’s nothing so sweet,” Mr. Shiftlet continued, “as a boy’s mother. She taught him his first prayers at her knee, she give him love when no other would, she told him what was right and what wasn’t, and she seen that he done the right thing. Son,” he said, “I never rued a day in my life like the one I rued when I left that ole’ mother of mine.”
The boy shifted in his seat but he didn’t look at Mr. Shiftlet. He unfolded his arms and put one hand on the door handle.
“My mother was a angel of Gawd,” Mr. Shiftlet said in a very strained voice. “He took her from heaven and giver to me and I left her.” His eyes were instantly clouded over with a mist of tears. The car was barely moving.
The boy turned angrily in the seat. “You go to the devil!” he cried. “My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking pole cat!” and with that he flung the door open and jumped out with his suitcase into the ditch.
Mr. Shiftlet was so shocked that for about a hundred feet he drove along slowly with the door still open. A cloud, the exact color of the boy’s hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. He raised his arm and let it fall again to his breast. “Oh Lord!” he prayed. “Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!”
The turnip continued slowly to descend. After a few minutes there was a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet’s car. Very quickly he stepped on the gas and with his stump sticking out the window he raced the galloping shower into Mobile.
The River (1953)
THE child stood glum and limp in the middle of the dark living room while his father pulled him into a plaid coal. His right arm was hung in the sleeve but the father buttoned the coat anyway and pushed him forward toward a pale spotted hand that stuck through the halfopen door.
“He ain’t fixed right,” a loud voice said from the hall.
“Well then for Christ’s sake fix him,” the father muttered. “It’s six o’clock in the morning.” He was in his bathrobe and barefooted. When he got the child to the door and tried to shut it, he found her looming in it, a speckled skeleton in a long pea-green coat and felt helmet.
“And his and my carfare,” she said. “It’ll be twict we have to ride the car.”
He went in the bedroom again to get the money and when he came back, she and the boy were both standing in the middle of the room. She was taking stock. “I couldn’t smell those dead cigarette butts long if I was ever to come sit with you,” she said, shaking him down in his coat.
“Here’s the change,” the father said. He went to the door and opened it wide and waited.
After she had counted the money she slipped it somewhere inside her coat and walked over to a watercolor hanging near the phonograph. “I know what time it is,” she said, peering closely at the black lines crossing into broken planes of violent color. “I ought to. My shift goes on at 10 P.M. and don’t get off till 5 and it takes me one hour to ride the Vine Street car.”
“Oh, I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll expect him back tonight, about eight or nine?”
“Maybe later,” she said. “We’re going to the river to a healing. This particular preacher don’t get around this way often. I wouldn’t have paid for that,” she said, nodding at the painting, “I would have drew it myself.”
“All right, Mrs. Connin, we’ll see you then,” he said drumming on the door.
A toneless voice called from the bedroom, ‘Bring me an icepack.”
“Too bad his mamma’s sick,” Mrs. Corwin said. “What’s her trouble?”
“We don’t know,” he muttered.
“We’ll ask the preacher to pray for her. He’s healed a lot of folks. The Reverend Bevel Summers. Maybe she ought to see him sometime.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “We’ll see you tonight,” and he disappeared into the bedroom and left them to go.
The little boy stared at her silently, his nose and eyes running. He was four or five. He had a long face and bulging chin and half-shut eyes set far apart. He seemed mute and patient, like an old sheep waiting to be let out.
“You’ll like this preacher,” she said. “The Reverend Bevel Summers. You ought to hear him sing.”
The bedroom door opened suddenly and the father stuck his head out and said, “Good-by, old man. Have a good time.”
“Good-by,” the little boy said and jumped as if he had been shot.
Mrs. Connin gave the watercolor another look. Then they went out into the hall and rang for the elevator. “I wouldn’t have drew it,” she said.
Outside the gray morning was blocked off on either side by the unlit empty buildings. “It’s going to fair up later,” she said, “but this is the last time we’ll be able to have any preaching at the river this year. Wipe your nose, Sugar Boy.”
He began rubbing his sleeve across it but she stopped him. “That ain’t nice,” she said. “Where’s your handkerchief?’
He put his hands in his pockets and pretended to look for it while she waited. “Some people don’t care how they send one off,” she murmured to her reflection in the coffee shop window. “You pervide.” She took a red and blue flowered handkerchief out of her pocket and stooped down and began to work on his nose. “Now blow,” she said and he blew. “You can borry it. Put it in your pocket.”
He folded it up and put it in his pocket carefully and they walked on to the corner and leaned against the side of a closed drugstore to wait for the car. Mrs. Connin turned up her coat collar so that it met her hat in the back. Her eyelids began to droop and she looked as if she might go to sleep against the wall. The little boy put a slight pressure on her hand.
“What’s your name?” she asked in a drowsy voice. “I don’t know but only your last name. I should have found out your first name.”
His name was Harry Ashfield and he had never thought at any time before of changing it. “Bevel,” he said.
Mrs. Connin raised herself from the wall. “Why ain’t that a coincident!” she said. “I told you that’s the name of this preacher!”
“Bevel,” he repeated.
She stood looking down at him as if he had become a marvel to her. “I’ll have to see you meet him today,” she said. “He’s no ordinary preacher. He’s a healer. He couldn’t do nothing for Mr. Connin though. Mr. Connin didn’t have the faith but he said he would try anything once. He had this griping in his gut.”
The trolley appeared as a yellow spot at the end of the deserted street.
“He’s gone to the government hospital now,” she said, “and they taken one-third of his stomach. I tell him he better thank Jesus for what he’s got left but he says he ain’t thanking nobody. Well I declare,” she murmured, “Bevel!”
They walked out to the tracks to wait. “Will he heal me?” Bevel asked.
“What you got?”
“I’m hungry,” he decided finally.
“Didn’t you have your breakfast?”
“I didn’t have time to be hungry yet then,” he said.
“Well when we get home we’ll both have us something,” she said.
“I’m ready myself.”
They got in the car and sat down a few seats behind the driver and Mrs. Connin took Bevel on her knees. “Now you be a good boy,” she said, “and let me get some sleep. Just don’t get off my lap.” She lay her head back and as he watched, gradually her eyes closed and her mouth fell open to show a few long scattered teeth, some gold and some darker than her face; she began to whistle and blow like a musical skeleton. There was no one in the car but themselves and the driver and when he saw she was asleep, he took out the flowered handkerchief and unfolded it and examined it carefully. Then he folded it up again and unzipped a place in the innerlining of his coat and hid it in there and shortly he went to sleep himself.
Her house was a half-mile from the end of the car line, set back a little from the road. It was tan paper brick with a porch across the front of it and a tin top. On the porch there were three little boys of different sizes with identical speckled faces and one tall girl who had her hair up in so many aluminum curlers that it glared like the roof. The three boys followed them inside and closed in on Bevel. They looked at him silently, not smiling.
“That’s Bevel,” Mrs. Connin said, taking off her coat. “It’s a coincident he’s named the same as the preacher. These boys are J. C., Spivey, and Sinclair, and that’s Sarah Mildred on the porch. Take off that coat and hang it on the bed post, Bevel.”
The three boys watched him while he unbuttoned the coat and took it oft. Then they watched him hang it on the bed post and then they stood, watching the coat. They turned abruptly and went out the door and had a conference on the porch.
Bevel stood looking around him at the room. It was part kitchen and part bedroom. The entire house was two rooms and two porches. Close to his foot the tail of a light-colored dog moved up and down between two floor boards as he scratched his back on the underside of the house. Bevel jumped on it but the hound was experienced and had already withdrawn when his feet hit the spot.
The walls were filled with pictures and calendars. There were two round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose; the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from. “That’s Mr. Connin,” Mrs. Connin said, standing back from the stove for a second to admire the face with him, “but it don’t favor him any more.” Bevel turned from Mr. Connin to a colored picture over the bed of a man wearing a white sheet. He had long hair and a gold circle around his head and he was sawing on a board while some children stood watching him. He was going to ask who that was when the three boys came in again and motioned for him to follow them. He thought of crawling under the bed and hanging onto one of the legs but the three boys only stood there, speckled and silent, waiting, and after a second he followed them at a little distance out on the porch and around the corner of the house. They started off through a field of rough yellow weeds to the hog pen, a five-foot boarded square full of shoats, which they intended to ease him over into. When they reached it, they turned and waited silently, leaning against the side.
He was coming very slowly, deliberately bumping his feet together as if he had trouble walking. Once he had been beaten up in the park by some strange boys when his sitter forgot him, but he hadn’t known anything was going to happen that time until it was over. He began to smell a strong odor of garbage and to hear the noises of a wild animal. He stopped a few feet from the pen and waited, pale but dogged.
The three boys didn’t move. Something seemed to have happened to them. They stared over his head as if they saw something coming behind him but he was afraid to turn his own head and look. Their speckles were pale and their eyes were still and gray as glass. Only their ears twitched slightly. Nothing happened. Finally, the one in the middle said, “She’d kill us,” and turned, dejected and hacked, and climbed up on the pen and hung over, staring ill.
Bevel sat down on the ground, dazed with relief, and grinned up at them.
The one sitting on the pen glanced at him severely. “Hey you,” he said after a second, “if you can’t climb up and see these pigs you can lift that bottom board off and look in thataway.’ He appeared to offer this as a kindness.
Bevel had never seen a real pig but he had seen a pig in a book and knew they were small fat pink animals with curly tails and round grinning faces and bow ties. He leaned forward and pulled eagerly at the board.
“Pull harder,” the littlest boy said. “It’s nice and rotten. Just lift out thet nail.”
He eased a long reddish nail out of the soft wood.
“Now you can lift up the board and put your face to the…” a quiet voice began.
He had already done it and another face, gray, wet and sour, was pushing into his, knocking him down and back as it scraped out under the plank. Something snorted over him and charged back again, rolling him over and pushing him up from behind and then sending him forward, screaming through the yellow field, while it bounded behind.
The three Connins watched from where they were. The one sitting on the pen held the loose board back with his gangling foot. Their stern faces didn’t brighten any but they seemed to become less taut, as if some great need had been partly satisfied. “Maw ain’t going to like him lettin’ out thet hawg,” the smallest one said.
Mrs. Connin was on the back porch and caught Bevel up as he reached the steps. The hog ran under the house and subsided, panting, but the child screamed for five minutes. When she had finally calmed him down, she gave him his breakfast and let him sit on her lap while he ate it. The shoat climbed the two steps onto the back porch and stood outside the screen door, looking in with his head lowered sullenly. He was long-legged and humpbacked and part of one of his ears had been bitten off.
“Git away!” Mrs. Connin shouted. “That one yonder favors Mr. Paradise that has the gas station,” she said. “You’ll see him today at the healing. He’s got the cancer over his ear. He always comes to show he ain’t been healed.”
The shoat stood squinting a few seconds longer and then moved off slowly. “I don’t want to see him,” Bevel said.
They walked to the river, Mrs. Connin in front with him and the three boys strung out behind and Sarah Mildred, the tall girl, at the end to holler if one of them ran out on the road. They looked like the skeleton of an old boat with two pointed ends, sailing slowly on the edge of the highway. The white Sunday sun followed at a little distance, climbing fast through a scum of gray cloud as if it meant to overtake them. Bevel walked Oil the out side edge, holding Mrs. Connin’s hand and looking down into the orange and purple gulley that dropped off from the concrete.
It occurred to him that he was lucky this time that they had found Mrs. Connin who would take you away for the day instead of an ordinary sitter who only sat where you lived or went to the park. You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ. Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke. They joked a lot where he lived. If he had thought about it before, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “damn” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime. When he had asked Mrs. Connin who the man in the sheet in the picture over her heel was, she had looked at him a while with her mouth open. Then she had said, “That’s Jesus,” and she had kept on looking at him.
In a few minutes she had got up and got a book out of the other room. “See here,” she said, turning over the cover,”this belonged to my great grandmamma. I wouldn’t part with it for nothing on earth.” She ran her finger under some brown writing on a spotted page. “Emma Stevens Oakley, 1832,” she said. “Ain’t that something to have? And every word of it the gospel truth,” She turned the next page and read him the name: “The Life of Jesus Christ for Readers Under Twelve.” Then she read him the book.
It was a small book, pale brown on the outside with gold edges and a smell like old putty. It was full of pictures, one of the carpenter driving a crowd of pigs out of a man. They were real pigs, gray and sour-looking, and Mrs. Connin said Jesus had driven them all out of this one man. When she finished reading, she let him sit on the floor and look at the pictures again.
Just before they left for the healing, he had managed to get the book inside his innerlining without her seeing him Now it made his coat hang down a little farther on one side than the other. His mind was dreamy and serene as they walked along and when they turned off the highway onto a long red clay road winding between banks of honeysuckle, he began to make wild leaps and pull forward on her hand as if he wanted to dash oft and snatch the sun which was rolling away ahead of them now.
They walked on the dirt road for a while and then they crossed a field stippled with purple weeds and entered the shadows of a wood where the ground was covered with thick pine needles. He had never been in woods before and he walked carefully, looking from side to side as if he were entering a strange country. They moved along a bridle path that twisted downhill through crackling red leaves, and once, catching at a branch to keep himself from slipping, he looked into two frozen greengold eyes enclosed in the darkness of a tree hole. At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly onto a pasture dotted here and there with black and white cows and sloping down, tier after tier, to a broad orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond.
There were people standing on the near bank in a group, singing. Long tables were set up behind them and a few cars and trucks were parked in a road that came up by the river. They crossed the pasture, hurrying, because Mrs. Connin, using her band for a shed over her eyes, saw the preacher already standing out in the water. She dropped her basket on one of the tables and pushed the three boys in front of her into the knot of people so that they wouldn’t linger by the food. She kept Bevel by the hand arid eased her way up to the front.
The preacher was standing about ten feet out in the stream where the water came up to his knees. He was a tall youth in khaki trousers that he had rolled up higher than the water. He had on a blue shirt and a red scarf around his neck but no hat and his light-colored hair was cut in sideburns that curved into the hollows of his cheeks. His face was all bone and red light reflected from the river. He looked as if he might have been nineteen years old. He was singing in a high twangy voice, above the singing on the bank, and he kept his hands behind him and his head tilted back.
He ended the hymn on a high note and stood silent, looking down at the water and shifting his feet in it. Then he looked up at the people on the bank. They stood close together, waiting; their faces were solemn but expectant and every eye was on him. He shifted his feet again.
“Maybe I know why you come,” he said in the twangy voice, “maybe I don’t.
“If you ain’t come for Jesus, you ain’t come for me. If you just come to see can you leave your pain in the river, you ain’t come for Jesus. You can’t leave your pain in the river,” he said. “I never told nobody that.” He stopped and looked down at his knees.
“I seen you cure a woman oncet!” a sudden high voice shouted from the hump of people. “Seen that woman git up and walk out straight where she had limped in!”
The preacher lifted one foot and then the other. He seemed almost but not quite to smile. “You might as well go home if that’s what you come for,” he said.
Then he lifted his head and arms and shouted, “Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain’t but one river and that’s the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood. That’s the river you have to lay your pain in, in the River of Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of Love, in the rich red river of Jesus’ Blood, you people!”
His voice grew soft and musical. “All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it because that’s the River that was made to carry sin. It’s a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old reel water river round my feet.
“Listen,” he sang, “I read in Mark about an unclean man, I read in Luke about a blind man, I read in John about a dead man! Oh you people hear! The same blood that makes this River red, made that leper clean, made that blind man stare, made that dead man leap! You people with trouble,” he cried, “lay it in that River of Blood, lay it in that River of Pain, and watch it move away toward the Kingdom of Christ.”
While he preached, Bevel’s eyes followed drowsily the slow circles of two silent birds revolving high in the air. Across the river there was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.
“If it’s this River of Life you want to lay your pain in, then come up,” the preacher said, “and lay your sorrow here. But don’t be thinking this is the last of it because this old red river don’t end here. This old red suffering stream goes on, you people, slow to the Kingdom of Christ. This old red river is good to Baptize in, good to lay your faith in, good to lay your pain in, but it ain’t this muddy water here that saves you. I been all up and down this river this week,” he said. “Tuesday I was in Fortune Lake, next day in Ideal, Friday me and my wife drove to Lulawillow to see a sick man there. Them people didn’t see no healing,” he said and his face burned redder for a second. “I never said they would.”
While he was talking a fluttering figure had begun to move forward with a kind of butterfly movement—an old woman with flapping arms whose head wobbled as if it might fall off any second. She managed to lower herself at the edge of the bank and let her arms churn in the water. Then she bent farther and pushed her face down in it and raised herself up finally, streaming wet; and still flapping, she turned a time or two in a blind circle until someone reached out and pulled her back into the group.
“She’s been that way for thirteen years,” a rough voice shouted. “Pass the hat and give this kid his money. That’s what he’s here for.” The shout, directed out to the boy in the river, came from a huge old man who sat like a humped stone on the bumper of a long ancient gray automobile. He had on a gray hat that was turned down over one ear and up over the other to expose a purple bulge on his left temple. He sat bent forward with his hands hanging between his knees and his small eyes half closed.
Bevel stared at him once and then moved into the folds of Mrs. Connin’s coat and hid himself.
The boy in the river glanced at the old man quickly and raised his fist. “Believe Jesus or the devil!” he cried. “Testify to one or the other!”
“I know from my own self-experience,” a woman’s mysterious voice called from the knot of people, “I know from it that this preacher can heal. My eyes have been opened! I testify to Jesus!”
The preacher lifted his arms quickly and began to repeat all that he had said before about the River and the Kingdom of Christ and the old man sat on the bumper, fixing him with a narrow squint. From time to time Bevel stared at him again from around Mrs. Connin.
A man in overalls and a brown coat leaned forward and dipped his hand in the water quickly and shook it and leaned back, and a woman held a baby over the edge of the bank and splashed its feet with water. One man moved a little distance away and sat down on the bank and took off his shoes and waded out into the stream; he stood there for a few minutes with his face tilted as far back as it would go, then he waded back and put on his shoes. All this time, the preacher sang and did not appear to watch what went on.
As soon as he stopped singing, Mrs. Cannin lifted Bevel up and said, “Listen here, preacher, I got a boy from town today that I’m keeping. His mamma’s sick and he wants you to pray for her. And this is a coincident—his name is Bevel! Bevel,” she said, turning to look at the people behind her, “same as his. Ain’t that a coincident, though?”
There were some murmurs and Bevel turned and grinned over her shoulder at the faces looking at him. “Bevel,” he said in a loud jaunty voice.
“Listen,” Mrs. Connin said, “have you ever been Baptized, Bevel?”
He only grinned.
“I suspect he ain’t ever been Baptized,” Mrs. Connin said, raising her eyebrows at the preacher.
“Swang him over here,” the preacher said and took a stride forward and caught him.
He held him in the crook of his arm and looked at the grinning face. Bevel rolled his eyes in a comical way and thrust his face forward, close to the preacher’s. “My name is Bevvvuuuuul,” he said in a loud deep voice and let the tip of his tongue slide across his mouth.
The preacher didn’t smile. His bony face was rigid and his narrow gray eyes reflected the almost colorless sky. There was a loud laugh from the old man sitting on the car bumper and Bevel grasped the back of the preacher’s collar and held it tightly. The grin had already disappeared from his face. He had the sudden feeling that this was not a joke. Where he lived everything was a joke. From the preacher’s face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke. “My mother named me that,” he said quickly.
“Have you ever been Baptized?” the preacher asked.
“What’s that?” he murmured.
“If I Baptize you,” the preacher said, “you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?”
“Yes,” the child said, and thought, I won’t go back to the apartment then, I’ll go under the river.
“You won’t be the same again,” the preacher said. “You’ll count.” Then he turned his face to the people and began to preach and Bevel looked over his shoulder at the pieces of the white sun scattered in the river. Suddenly the preacher said, “All right, I’m going to Baptize you now,” and without more warning, he tightened his hold and swung him upside down and plunged his head into the water. He held him under while he said the words of Baptism and then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child. Bevel’s eyes were dark and dilated. “You count now,” the preacher said. “You didn’t even count before.”
The little boy was too shocked to cry. He spit out the muddy water and rubbed his wet sleeve into his eyes and over his face.
“Don’t forget his mamma,” Mrs. Connin called. “He wants you to pray for his mamma. She’s sick.”
“Lord,” the preacher said, “we pray for somebody in affiiction who isn’t here to testify. Is your mother sick in the hospital?” he asked. “Is she in pain?”
The child stared at him. “She hasn’t got up yet,” he said in a high dazed voice. “She has a hangover.” The air was so quiet he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking the water.
The preacher looked angry and startled. The red drained out of his face and the sky appeared to darken in his eyes. There was a loud guffaw from the bank and Mr. Paradise shouted, “Haw! Cure the afflicted woman with the hangover!” and began to beat his knee with his fist.
“He’s had a long day,” Mrs. Connin said, standing with him in the door of the apartment and looking sharply into the room where the party was going on. “I reckon it’s past his regular bedtime.” One of Bevel’s eyes was closed and the other half closed; his nose was running and he kept his mouth open and breathed through it. The damp plain coat dragged down on one side.
That would be her, Mrs. Connin decided, in the black britches—long black satin britches and barefoot sandals and red toenails. She was lying on half the sofa, with her knees crossed in the air and her head propped on the arm. She didn’t get up.
“Hello Harry,” she said. “Did you have a big day?” She had a long pale face, smooth and blank, and straight sweet-patata-colored hair, pulled back.
The father went off to get the money. There were two other couples. One of the men, blond with little violet-blue eyes, leaned out of his chair and said, “Well Harry, old man, have a big day?”
“His name ain’t Harry. It’s Bevel,” Mrs. Connin said.
“His name is Harry,” she said from the sofa. “Whoever heard of anybody named Bevel?”
The little boy had seemed to be going to sleep on his feet, his head drooping farther and farther forward; he pulled it back suddenly and opened one eye; the other was stuck.
“He told me this morning his name was Bevel,” Mrs. Connin said in a shocked voice. “The same as our preacher. We been all day at a preaching and healing at the river. He said his name was Bevel, the same as the preacher’s. That’s what he told me.”
“Bevel!” his mother said. “My God! what a name.”
“This preacher is name Bevel and there’s no better preacher around,” Mrs. Cannin said. “And furthermore,” she added in a defiant tone, “he Baptized this child this morning!”
His mother sat straight up. “Well the nerve!” she muttered.
“Furthermore,” Mrs. Connin said, “he’s a healer and he prayed for you to be healed.”
“Healed!” she almost shouted. “Healed of what for Christ’s sake?”
“Of your affliction,” Mrs. Connin said icily.
The father had returned with the money and was standing near Mrs. Cannin waiting to give it to her. His eyes were lined with red threads. “Go on, go on,” he said, “I want to hear more about her affliction. The exact nature of it has escaped…” He waved the bill and his voice trailed off. “Healing by prayer is mighty inexpensive,” he murmured.
Mrs. Connin stood a second, staring into the room, with a skeleton’s appearance of seeing everything. Then, without taking the money, she turned and shut the door behind her. The father swung around, smiling vaguely, and shrugged. The rest of them were looking at Harry. The little boy began to shamble toward the bedroom.
“Come here, Harry,” his mother said. He automatically shifted his direction toward her without opening his eyes any farther. “Tell me what happened today,” she said when he reached her. She began to pull off his coat.
“I don’t know,” he muttered.
“Yes you do know,” she said, feeling the coat heavier on one side.
She unzipped the innerlining and caught the book and a dirty handkerchief as they fell out. “Where did you get these?”
“I don’t know,” he said and grabbed for them. “They’re mine. She gave them to me.”
She threw the handkerchief down and held the book too high for him to reach and began to read it, her face after a second assuming an exaggerated comical expression. The others moved around and looked at it over her shoulder. “My God,” somebody said.
One of the men peered at it sharply from behind a thick pair of glasses. “That’s valuable,” he said. “That’s a collector’s item,” and he took it away from the rest of them and retired to another chair.
“Don’t let George go off with that,” his girl said.
“I tell you it’s valuable,” George said. “1832.”
Bevel shifted his direction again toward the room where he slept. He shut the door behind him and moved slowly in the darkness to the bed and sat down and took off his shoes and got under the cover. After a minute a shaft of light let in the tall silhouette of his mother. She tiptoed lightly cross the room and sat down on the edge of his bed. “What did that dolt of a preacher say about me?” she whispered. “What lies have you been telling today, honey?”
He shut his eye and heard her voice from a long way away, as if he were under the river and she on top of it. She shook his shoulder. “Harry,” she said, leaning down and putting her mouth to his ear, “tell me what he said.” She pulled him into a sitting position and he felt as if he had been drawn up from under the river. “Tell me,” she whispered and her bitter breath covered his face.
He saw the pale oval close to him in the dark. “He said I’m not the same now,” he muttered. “I count.”
After a second, she lowered him by his shirt front onto the pillow. She hung over him an instant and brushed her lips against his forehead. Then she got up and moved away, swaying her hips lightly through the shaft of light.
He didn’t wake up early but the apartment was still dark and close when he did. For a while he lay there, picking his nose and eyes. Then he sat up in bed and looked out the window. The sun came in palely, stained gray by the glass. Across the street at the Empire Hotel, a colored cleaning woman was looking down from an upper window, resting her face on her folded arms. He got up and put on his shoes and went to the bathroom and then into the front room. He ate two crackers spread with anchovy paste, that he found on the coffee table, and drank some ginger ale left in a bottle and looked around for his book but it was not there.
The apartment was silent except for the faint humming of the refrigerator. He went into the kitchen and found some raisin bread heels and spread a half jar of peanut butter between them and climbed up on the tall kitchen stool and sat chewing the sandwich slowly, wiping his nose every now and then on his shoulder. When he finished he found some chocolate milk and drank that. He would rather have had the ginger ale he saw but they left the bottle openers where he couldn’t reach them. He studied what was left in the refrigerator for a while—some shriveled vegetables that she had forgot were there and a lot of brown oranges that she bought and didn’t squeeze; there were three or four kinds of cheese and something fishy in a paper bag; the rest was a pork bone. He left the refrigerator door open and wandered back into the dark living room and sat down on the sofa.
He decided they would be out cold until one o’clock and that they would all have to go to a restaurant for lunch. He wasn’t high enough for the table yet and the waiter would bring a highchair and he was too big for a highchair. He sat in the middle of the sofa, kicking it with his heels. Then he got up and wandered around the room, looking into the ashtrays at the butts as if this might be a habit. In his own room he had picture books and blocks but they were for the most part torn up; he found the way to get new ones was to tear up the ones he had. There was very little to do at any time but eat; however, he was not a fat boy.
He decided he would empty a few of the ashtrays on the floor. If he only emptied a few, she would think they had fallen. He emptied two, rubbing the ashes carefully into the rug with his finger. Then he lay on the floor for a while, studying his feet which he held up in the air. His shoes were still damp and he began to think about the river.
Very slowly, his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn’t know he’d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.
He got up and tiptoed into their bedroom and stood in the dim light there, looking for her pocketbook. His glance passed her long pale arm hanging off the edge of the bed down to the floor, and across the white mound his father made, and past the crowded bureau, until it rested on the pocketbook hung on the back of a chair. He took a car-token out of it and half a package of Life Savers. Then he left the apartment and caught the car at the corner. He hadn’t taken a suitcase because there was nothing from there he wanted to keep.
He got off the car at the end of the line and started down the road he and Mrs. Connin had taken the day before. He knew there wouldn’t be anybody at her house because the three boys and the girl went to school and Mrs. Conn in had told him she went out to clean. He passed her yard and walked on the way they had gone to the river. The paper brick houses were far apart and after a while the dirt place to walk on ended and he had to walk on the edge of the highway. The sun was pale yellow and high and hot.
He passed a shack with an orange gas pump in front of it but he didn’t see the old man looking out at nothing in particular from the doorway. Mr. Paradise was having an orange drink. He finished it slowly, squinting over the bottle at the small plaid-coated figure disappearing down the road. Then he set the empty bottle on a bench and, still squinting, wiped his sleeve over his mouth. He went in the shack and picked out a peppermint stick, a foot long and two inches thick, from the candy shelf, and stuck it in his hip pocket. Then he got in his car and drove slowly down the highway after the boy.
By the time Bevel came to the field speckled with purple weeds, he was dusty and sweating and he crossed it at a trot to get into the woods as fast as he could. Once inside, he wandered from tree to tree, trying to find the path they had taken yesterday. Finally he found a line Worn in the pine needles and followed it until he saw the steep trail twisting down through the trees.
Mr. Paradise had left his automobile back some wayan the road and had walked to the place where he was accustomed to sit almost every day, holding an unbaited fishline in the water while he stared at the river passing in front of him. Anyone looking at him from a distance would have seen an old boulder half hidden in the bushes.
Bevel didn’t see him at all. He only saw the river, shimmering reddish yellow, and bounded into it with his shoes and his coat on and took a gulp. He swallowed some and spit the rest out and then he stood there in water up to his chest and looked around him. The sky was a clear pale blue, all in one piece—except for the hole the sun made—and fringed around the bottom with treetops. His coat floated to the surface and surrounded him like a strange gay lily pad and he stood grinning in the sun. He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn’t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward.
In a second he began to gasp and sputter and his head reappeared on the surface; he started under again and the same thing happened. The river wouldn’t have him. He tried again and came up, choking. This was the way it had been when the preacher held him under—he had had to fight with something that pushed him back in the face. He stopped and thought suddenly: it’s another joke, it’s just another joke! He thought how far he had come for nothing and he began to hit and splash and kick the filthy river. His feet were already treading on nothing. He gave one low cry of pain and indignation. Then he heard a shout and turned his head and saw something like a giant pig bounding after him, shaking a red and white club and shouting. He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him.
Mr. Paradise’s head appeared from time to time on the surface of the water. Finally, far downstream, the old man rose like some ancient water monster and stood empty-handed, staring with his dull eyes as far down the river line as he could see.
A Circle in the Fire (1954)
SOMETIMES the last line of trees was a solid gray-blue wall a little darker than the sky but this afternoon it was almost black and behind it the sky was a livid glaring white. “You know that woman that had that baby in that iron lung?” Mrs. Pritchard said. She and the child’s mother were underneath the window the child was looking down from. Mrs. Pritchard was leaning against the chimney, her arms folded on a shelf of stomach, one foot crossed and the toe pointed into the ground. She was a large woman with a small pointed face and steady ferreting eyes. Mrs. Cope was the opposite, very small and trim, with a large round face and black eyes that seemed to be enlarging all the time behind her glasses as if she were continually being astonished. She was squatting down pulling grass out of the border beds around the house. Both women had on sunhats that had once been identical but now Mrs. Pritchard’s was faded and out of shape while Mrs. Cope’s was still stiff and bright green.
“I read about her,” she said.
“She was a Pritchard that married a Brookins and so’s kin to me—about my seventh or eighth cousin by marriage.”
“Well, well,” Mrs. Cope muttered and threw a large clump of nut grass behind her. She worked at the weeds and nut grass as if they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place.
“Beinst she was kin to us, we gone to see the body,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “Seen the little baby too.”
Mrs. Cope didn’t say anything. She was used to these calamitous stories; she said they wore her to a frazzle. Mrs. Pritchard would go thirty miles for the satisfaction of seeing anybody laid away. Mrs. Cope always changed the subject to something cheerful but the child had observed that this only put Mrs. Pritchard in a bad humor.
The child thought the blank sky looked as if it were pushing against the fortress wall, trying to break through. The trees across the near field were a patchwork of gray and yellow greens. Mrs. Cope was always worrying about fires in her woods. When the nights were very windy, she would say to the child, “Oh Lord, do pray there won’t be any fires, it’s so windy,” and the child would grunt from behind her book or not answer at all because she heard it so often. In the evenings in the summer when they sat on the porch, Mrs. Cope would say to the child who was reading fast to catch the last light, “Get up and look at the sunset, it’s gorgeous. You ought to get up and look at it,” and the child would scowl and not answer or glare up once across the lawn and two front pastures to the gray-blue sentinel line of trees and then begin to read again with no change of expression, sometimes muttering for meanness, “It looks like a fire. You better get up and smell around and see if the woods ain’t on fire.”
“She had her arm around it in the coffin,” Mrs. Pritchard went on, but her voice was drowned out by the sound of the tractor that the Negro, Culver, was driving up the road from the barn. The wagon was attached and another Negro was sitting in the back, bouncing, his feet jogging about a foot from the ground. The one on the tractor drove it past the gate that led into the field on the left.
Mrs. Cope turned her head and saw that he had not gone through the gate because he was too lazy to get off and open it. He was going the long way around at her expense. “Tell him to stop and come here!” she shouted.
Mrs. Pritchard heaved herself from the chimney and waved her arm in a fierce circle but he pretended not to hear. She stalked to the edge of the lawn and screamed, “Get off, I toljer! She wants you!”
He got off and started toward the chimney, pushing his head and shoulders forward at each step to give the appearance of hurrying. His head was thrust up to the top in a white cloth hat streaked with different shades of sweat. The brim was down and hid all but the lower parts of his reddish eyes.
Mrs. Cope was on her knees, pointing the trowel into the ground. “Why aren’t you going through the gate there?” she asked and waited, her eyes shut and her mouth stretched flat as if she were prepared for any ridiculous answer.
“Got to raise the blade on the mower if we do,” he said and his gaze bore just to the left of her. Her Negroes were as destructive and impersonal as the nut grass.
Her eyes, as she opened them, looked as if they would keep on enlarging until they turned her wrongsideout. “Raise it,” she said and pointed across the road with the trowel.
He moved off.
“It’s nothing to them,” she said. “They don’t have the responsibility. I thank the Lord all these things don’t come at once. They’d destroy me.”
“Yeah, they would,” Mrs. Pritchard shouted against the sound of the tractor. He opened the gate and raised the blade and drove through and down into the field; the noise diminished as the wagon disappeared. “I don’t see myself how she had it in it,” she went on in her normal voice.
Mrs. Cope was bent over, digging fiercely at the nut grass again. “We have a lot to be thankful for,” she said. “Every day you should say a prayer of thanksgiving. Do you do that?”
“Yes’m,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “See she was in ill four months before she even got thataway. Look like to me if I was in one of them, I would leave off… how you reckun they…?”
“Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving,” Mrs. Cope said. “Think of all we have. Lord.” she said and sighed, “we have everything,” and she looked around at her rich pastures and hills heavy with timber and shook her head as if it might all he a burden she was trying to shake off her back.
Mrs. Pritchard studied the woods. “All I got is four abscess teeth,” she remarked.
“Well, be thankful you don ‘t have five,” Mrs. Cope snapped and threw back a clump of grass. “We might all be destroyed by a hurricane. I can always find something to be thankful for.”
Mrs. Pritchard took up a hoe resting against the side of the house and struck lightly at a weed that had come up between two bricks in the chimney. “I reckon you can,” she said, her voice a little more nasal than usual with contempt.
“Why, think of all those poor Europeans,” Mrs. Cope went on, “that they put in boxcars like cattle and rode them to Siberia. Lord,” she said, “we ought to spend half our time on our knees.”
“I know if I was in an iron lung there would be some things I wouldn’t do,” Mrs. Pritchard said, scratching her bare ankle with the end of the hoe.
“Even that poor woman had plenty to be thankful for,” Mrs. Cope said.
“She could be thankful she wasn’t dead.”
“Certainly,” Mrs. Cope said, and then she pointed the trowel up at Mrs. Pritchard and said, “I have the best kept place in the county and do you know why? Because I work. I’ve had to work to save this place and work to keep it.” She emphasized each word with the trowel. “I don’t let anything get ahead of me and I’m not always looking for trouble. I take it as it comes.”
“If it all come at oncet sometime,” Mrs. Pritchard began.
“It doesn’t all come at once,” Mrs. Cope said sharply.
The child could see over to where the dirt road joined the highway. She saw a pick-up truck stop at the gate and let off three boys who started walking up the pink dirt road. They walked single file, the middle one bent to the side carrying a black pig-shaped valise.
“Well, if it ever did,” Mrs. Pritchard said, “it wouldn’t be nothing you could do but fling up your hands.”
Mrs. Cope didn’t even answer this. Mrs. Pritchard folded her arms and gazed down the road as if she could easily enough see all these fine hills flattened to nothing. She saw the three boys who had almost reached the front walk by now. “Lookit yonder,” she said. “Who you reckon they are?”
Mrs. Cope leaned back and supported herself with one hand behind her and looked. The three’ came toward them but as if they were going to walk on through the side of the house. The one with the suitcase was in front now. Finally about four feet from her, he stopped and set it down. The three boys looked something alike except that the middle-sized one wore silver-rimmed spectacles and carried the suitcase. One of his eyes had a slight cast to it so that his gaze seemed to be coming from two directions at once as if it had them surrounded. He had on a sweat shirt with a faded destroyer printed on it but his chest was so hollow that the destroyer was broken in the middle and seemed on the point of going under. His hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looked to be about thirteen. All three boys had white penetrating stares. “I don’t reckon you remember me, Mrs. Cope,” he said.
“Your face is certainly familiar,” she murmured, scrutinizing him. “Now let’s see…“
“My daddy used to work here,” he hinted.
“Boyd?” she said. “Your father was Mr. Boyd and you’re J.C.?”
“Nome, I’m Powell, the secant one, only I’ve growed some since then and my daddy he’s daid now. Done died.”
“Dead. Well I declare,” Mrs. Cope said as if death were always an unusual thing. “What was Mr. Boyd’s trouble?”
One of Powell’s eyes seemed to be making a circle of the place, examining the house and the white water tower behind it and the chicken houses and the pastures that rolled away on either side until they met the first line of woods. The other eye looked at her. “Died in Florda,” he said and began kicking the valise.
“Well I declare,” she murmured. After a second she said, “And how is your mother?”
“Mah’d again.” He kept watching his foot kick the suitcase. The other two boys stared at her impatiently.
“And where do you all live now?” she asked.
“Atlanta,” he said. “You know, out to one of them developments.”
“Well I see,” she said, “I see.” After a second she said it again. Finally she asked, “And who are these other boys?” and smiled at them.
“Garfield Smith him, and W. T. Harper him,” he said, nodding his head backward first in the direction of the large boy and then the small one.
“How do you boys do?” Mrs. Cope said. “This is Mrs. Pritchard.
Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard work here now.”
They ignored Mrs. Pritchard who watched them with steady beady eyes. The three seemed to hang there, waiting, watching Mrs. Cope.
“Well well,” she said, glancing at the suitcase, “it’s nice of you to stop and see me. I think that was real sweet of you.”
Powell’s stare seemed to pinch her like a pair of tongs. “Come back to see how you was doing,” he said hoarsely.
“Listen here,” the smallest boy said, “all the time we been knowing him he’s been telling us about this here place. Said it was everything here. Said it was horses here. Said he had the best time of his entire life right here on this here place. Talks about it all the time.”
“Never shuts his trap about this place,” the big boy grunted, drawing his arm across his nose as if to muffle his words.
“Always talking about them horses he rid here,” the small one continued, “and said he would let us ride them too. Said it was one name Gene.”
Mrs. Cope was always afraid someone would get hurt on her place and sue her for everything she had. “They aren’t shod,” she said quickly. “There was one named Gene but he’s dead now but I’m afraid you boys can’t ride the horses because you might get hurt. They’re dangerous,” she said, speaking very fast.
The large boy sat down on the ground with a noise of disgust and began to finger rocks out of his tennis shoe. The small one darted looks here and there and Powell fixed her with his stare and didn’t say anything.
After a minute the little boy said, “Say, lady, you know what he said one time? He said when he died he wanted to come here!”
For a second Mrs. Cope looked blank; then she blushed; then a peculiar look of pain came over her face as she realized that these children were hungry. They were staring because they were hungry! She almost gasped in their faces and then she asked them quickly if they would have something to eat. They said they would but their expressions, composed and unsatisfied, didn’t lighten any. They looked as if they were used to being hungry and it was no business of hers.
The child upstairs had grown red in the face with excitement. She was kneeling down by the window so that only her eyes and forehead showed over the sill. Mrs. Cope told the boys to come around on the other side of the house where the lawn chairs were and she led the way and Mrs. Pritchard followed. The child moved from the right bedroom across the hall and over into the left bedroom and looked down on the other side of the house where there were three white lawn chairs and red hammock strung between two hazelnut trees. She was a pale fat girl of twelve with a frowning squint and a large mouth full ur silver bands. She knelt down at the window.
The three boys came around the corner of the house and the large one threw himself into the hammock and lit a stub of cigarette. The small boy tumbled down on the grass next to the black suitcase and rested his head on it and Powell sat down on the edge of one of the chairs and looked as if he were trying to enclose the whole place in one encircling stare. The child heard her mother and Mrs. Pritchard in a muted conference in the kitchen. She got up and went out into the hall and leaned over the banisters.
Mrs. Cope’s and Mrs. Pritchard’s legs were facing each other in the back hall. “Those poor children are hungry.” Mrs. Cope said in a dead voice.
“You seen that suitcase?” Mrs. Pritchard asked. “What if they intend to spend the night with you?”
Mrs. Cope gave a slight shriek. “I can’t have three boys in here with only me and Sally Virginia,” she said. “I ‘m sure they’ll go when I feed them.”
“I only know they got a suitcase.” Mrs. Pritchard said.
The child hurried back to the window, The large boy was stretched out in the hammock with his wrists crossed under his head and the cigarette stub in the center of his mouth. He spit it out in an arc just as Mrs. Cope came around the corner of the house with a plate of crackers. She stopped instantly as if a snake had been slung in her path. “Ashfield!’ she said. “Please pick that up. I’m afraid of fires.”
“Gawfield!” the little boy shouted indignantly. “Gawfield!”
The large boy raised himself without a word and lumbered for the butt. He picked it up and put it in his pocket and stood with his back to her, examining a tattooed heart on his forearm. Mrs. Pritchard came up holding three Coca-Colas by the necks in one hand and gave one to each of them.
“I remember everything about this place,” Powell said, looking down the opening of his bottle.
“Where did you all go when you left here?” Mrs. Cope asked and put the plate of crackers on the arm of his chair.
He looked at it but didn’t take one. He said, “I remember it was one name Gene and it was one name George, We gone to Florda and my daddy he, you know, died, and then we gone to my sister’s and then my mother she, you know, mah’d, and we been there ever since. “
“There are some crackers,” Mrs. Cope said and sat down in the chair across from him.
“He don’t like it in Atlanta,” the little boy said, sitting up and reaching indifferently for a cracker. “He ain’t ever satisfied with where he’s at except this place here. Lemme tell you what he’ll do, lady. We’ll be playing ball, see, on this here place in this development we got to play ball on, see, and he’ll quit playing and say, ‘Goddam, it was a horse down there name Gene and if I had him here I’d bust this concrete to hell riding him!’”
“I’m sure Powell doesn’t use words like that, do you, Powell?” Mrs. Cope said.
“No, mam,” Powell said. His head was turned completely to the side as if he were listening for the horses in the field, “I don’t like them kind of crackers,” the little boy said and returned his to the plate and got up.
Mrs. Cope shifted in her chair. “So you boys live in one of those nice new developments,” she said.
“The only way you can tell your own is by smell,” the small boy volunteered. “They’re four stories high and there’s ten of them, one behind the other. Let’s go see them horses,” he said.
Powell turned his pinching look on Mrs, Cope. “We thought we would just spend the night in your barn,” he said. “My uncle brought us this far on his pick-up truck and he’s going to stop for us again in the morning.”
There was a moment in which she didn’t say a thing and the child in the window thought: she’s going to fly out of that chair and hit the tree.
“Well, I’m afraid you can’t do that,” she said, getting up suddenly, “The barn’s full of hay and I’m afraid of fire from your cigarettes.”
“We won’t smoke,” he said.
“I’m afraid you can’t spend the night in there just the same,” she repeated as if she were talking politely to a gangster.
“Well, we can camp out in the woods then,” the little boy said. “We brought our own blankets anyways. That’s what we got in theter suitcase. Come on.”
“In the woods!” she said. “Oh no! The woods are very dry now, I can’t have people smoking in my woods. You’ll have to camp out in the field, in this field here next to the house, where there aren’t any trees.”
“Where she can keep her eye on you,” the child said under her breath.
“Her woods,” the large boy muttered and got out of the hammock.
“We’ll sleep in the field,” Powell said but not particularly as if he were talking to her. “This afternoon I’m going to show them about this place.” The other two were already walking away and he got up and bounded after them and the two women sat with the black suitcase between them.
“Not no thank you, not no nothing,” Mrs. Pritchard remarked.
“They only played with what we gave them to eat,” Mrs. Cope said in a hurt voice.
Mrs. Pritchard suggested that they might not like soft drinks.
“They certainly looked hungry,” Mrs. Cope said.
About sunset they appeared out of the woods, dirty and sweating, and came to the back porch and asked for water. They did not ask for food but Mrs. Cope could tell that they wanted it. “All I have is some cold guinea,” she said. “Would you boys like some guinea and some sandwiches?”
“I wouldn’t eat nothing baldheaded like a guinea,” the little boy said. “I would eat a chicken or a turkey but not no guinea.”
“Dog wouldn’t eat one of them,” the large boy said. He had taken off his shirt and stuck it in the hack of his trousers like a tail. Mrs. Cope carefully avoided looking at him. The little boy had a cut on his arm.
“You boys haven’t been riding the horses when I asked you not to, have you?” she asked suspiciously and they all said, “No mam!” at once in loud enthusiastic voices like the Amens are said in country churches.
She went into the house and made them sandwiches and, while she did it, she held a conversation with them from inside the kitchen, asking what their fathers did and how many brothers and sisters they had and where they went to school. They answered in short explosive sentences, pushing each other’s shoulders and doubling up with laughter as if the questions had meanings she didn’t know about. “And do you have men teachers or lady teachers at your school?” she asked.
“Some of both and some you can’t tell which,” the big boy hooted.
“And does your mother work, Powell?” she asked quickly.
“She ast you does your mother work!” the little boy yelled. “His mind’s affected by them horses he only looked at,” he said. “His mother she works at a factory and leaves him to mind the rest of them only he don’t mind them much. Lemme tell you, lady, one time he locked his little brother in a box and set it on fire.”
“I’m sure Powell wouldn’t do a thing like that.” she said, coming out with the plate of sandwiches and setting it down on the step. They emptied the plate at once and she picked it up and stood holding it, looking at the sun which was going down in front of them, almost on top of the tree line. It was swollen and flame-colored and hung in a net of ragged cloud as if it might burn through any second and fall into the woods. From the upstairs window the child saw her shiver and catch both arms to her sides. “We have so much to be thankful for,” she said suddenly in a mournful marveling tone. “Do you boys thank God every night for all He’s done for you? Do you thank Him for everything?”
This put an instant hush over them. They bit into the sandwiches as if they had lost all taste for food.
“Do you?” she persisted.
They were as silent as thieves hiding. They chewed without a sound.
“Well, I know I do,” she said at length and turned and went back to the house and the child watched their shoulders drop. The large one stretched his legs out as if he were releasing himself from a trap. The sun burned so fast that it seemed to be trying to set everything in sight on fire. The white water tower was glazed pink and the grass was an unnatural green as if it were turning to glass. The child suddenly stuck her head far out the window and said, “Ugggghhrhh,” in a loud voice, crossing her eyes and hanging her tongue out as far as possible as if she were going to vomit.
The large boy looked up and stared at her. “Jesus,” he growled, “another woman.”
She dropped back from the window and stood with her back against the wall, squinting fiercely as if she had been slapped in the face and couldn’t see who had done it. As soon as they left the steps, she came down into the kitchen where Mrs. Cope was washing the dishes. “If I had that big boy down I’d beat the daylight out of him,” she said.
“You keep away from those boys,” Mrs. Cope said, turning sharply. “Ladies don’t beat the daylight out of people. You keep out of their way. They’ll be gone in the morning.”
But in the morning they were not gone.
When she went out on the porch after breakfast, they were standing around the back door, kicking the steps. They were smelling the bacon she had had for her breakfast. “Why boys!” she said. “I thought you were going to meet your uncle.” They had the same look of hardened hunger that had pained her yesterday but today she felt faintly provoked.
The big boy turned his back at once and the small one squatted down and began to scratch in the sand. “We ain’t, though,” Powell said.
The big boy turned his head just enough to take in a small section of her and said, “We ain’t bothering nothing of yours.”
He couldn’t see the why her eyes enlarged but he could take note of the significant silence. After a minute she said in an altered voice, “Would you boys care for some breakfast?”
“We got plenty of our own food,” the big boy said. “We don’t want nothing of yours.”
She kept her eyes on Powell. His thin while face seemed to confront but not actually to see her. “You boys know that I’m glad to have you,” she said, “but I expect you to behave. I expect you to act like gentlemen.”
They stood there, each looking in a different direction, as if they were waiting for her to leave. “After all,” she said in a suddenly high voice, “this is my place.”
The big boy made some ambiguous noise and they turned and walked off toward the barn, leaving her there with a shocked look as if she had had a searchlight thrown on her in the middle of the night.
In a little while Mrs. Pritchard came over and stood in the kitchen door with her cheek against the edge of it. “I reckon you know they rode them horses all yesterday afternoon,” she said. “Stole a bridle out the saddleroom and rode bareback because Hollis seen them. He runnum out the barn at nine o’clock last night and then he runnum out the milk room this morning and there was milk all over their mouths like they had been drinking out the cans.”
“I cannot have this,” Mrs Cope said and stood at the sink with both fists knotted at her sides. “I cannot have this,” and her expression was the same as when she tore at the nut grass.
“There ain’t a thing you can do about it,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “What I expect is you’ll have them for a week or so until school begins. They just figure to have themselves a vacation in the country and there ain’t nothing you can do but fold your hands.”
“I do not fold my hands,” Mrs. Cope said. “Tell Mr. Pritchard to put the horses up in the stalls.”
“He’s already did that. You take a boy thirteen year old is equal in meanness to a man twict his age. It’s no telling what he’ll think up to do. You never know where he’ll strike next, This morning Hollis seen them behind the bull pen and that big one ast if it wasn’t some place they could wash at and Hollis said no it wasn’t and that you didn’t want no boys dropping cigarette butts in your woods and he said, ‘She don’t own them woods,’ and Hollis said, ‘Shes does too,’ and that there little one he said, ‘Man, Gawd owns them woods and her too,’ and that there one with the glasses said, ‘I reckon she owns the sky over this place too,’ and that there littlest one says, ‘Owns the sky and can’t no airplane go over here without she says so,’ and then the big one says, ‘I never seen a place with so many damn women on it, how do you stand it here?’ and Hollis said he had done had enough of their big talk by then and he turned and walked off without giving no reply one way or the other.”
“I’m going out there and tell those boys they can get a ride away from here on the milk truck,” Mrs. Cope said and she went out the back door, leaving Mrs. Pritchard and the child together in the kitchen.
“Listen,” the child said. “I could handle them quicker than that.”
“Yeah?” Mrs. Pritchard murmured, giving her a long leering look. “How’d you handle them?”
The child gripped both hands together and made a contorted face as if she were strangling someone.
“They’d handle you,” Mrs. Pritchard said with satisfaction.
The child retired to the upstairs window to get out of her way and looked down where her mother was walking off from the three boys who were squatting under the water tower eating something out of a cracker box. She heard her come in the kitchen door and say, “They say they’ll go on the milk truck, and no wonder they aren’t hungry—they have that suitcase half full of food.”
“Likely stole every bit of it too,” Mrs. Pritchard said.
When the milk truck came, the three boys were nowhere in sight, but as soon as it left without them their three faces appeared, looking out of the opening in the top of the calf barn. “Can you beat this?” Mrs. Cope said, standing at one of the upstairs windows with her hands at her hips. “It’s not that I wouldn’t be glad to have them—it’s their attitude.”
“You never like nobody’s attitude,” the child said. “I’ll go tell them they got five minutes to leave here in.”
“You are not to go anywhere near those boys, do you hear me?” Mrs. Cope said.
“Why?” the child asked, ‘
‘I’m going out there and give them a piece of my mind,” Mrs. Cope said.
The child took over the position in the window and in a few minutes she saw the stiff green hat catching the glint of the sun as her mother crossed the road toward the calf barn, The three faces immediately disappeared from the opening, and in a second the large boy dashed across the lot, followed in instant later by the other two. Mrs. Pritchard came out and the two women started for the grove of trees the boys had vanished into. Presently the two sunhats disappeared in the woods and the three boys came out at the left side of it and ambled across the field and into another patch of woods. By the time Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard reached the field, it was empty and there was nothing for them to do but come home again.
Mrs. Cope had not been inside long before Mrs. Pritchard came running toward the house, shouting something. “They’ve let out the bull!” she hollered. “Let out the bull!” And in a second she was followed by the bull himself, ambling, black and leisurely, with four geese hissing at his heels. He was not mean until hurried and it took Mr. Pritchard and the two Negroes a half-hour to ease him back to his pen. While the men were engaged in this, the boys let the oil out of the three tractors and then disappeared again into the woods.
Two blue veins had come out on either side of Mrs. Cope’s forehead and Mrs. Pritchard observed them with satisfaction. “Like I toljer,” she said, “there ain’t a thing you can do about it.”
Mrs. Cope ate her dinner hastily, not conscious that she had her sunhat on. Every time she heard a noise, she jumped up. Mrs. Pritchard came over immediately after dinner and said, “Well, you want to know where they are now?” and smiled in an omniscient rewarded way.
“I want to know at once,” Mrs. Cope said, coming to an almost military attention.
“Down to the road, throwing rocks at your mailbox,” Mrs. Pritchard said, leaning comfortably in the dour. “Done already about knocked it off its stand.”
“Get in the car,” Mrs. Cope said.
The child got in too and the three of them drove down the road to the gate. The boys were sitting on the embankment on the other side of the highway, aiming rocks across the road at the mailbox. Mrs. Cope stopped the car almost directly beneath them and looked up out of her window. The three of them stared at her as if they had never seen her before, the large boy with a sullen glare, the small one glint-eyed and unsmiling, and Powell with his two-sided glassed gaze hanging vacantly over the crippled destroyer on his shirt.
“Powell,” she said, “I’m sure your mother would be ashamed of you,” and she stopped and waited for this to make its effect. His face seemed to twist slightly but he continued to look through her at nothing in particular.
“Now I’ve put up with this as long as I can,” she said. “I’ve tried to be nice to you boys. Haven’t I been nice to you boys?”
They might have been three statues except that the big one, barely opening his mouth, said, “We’re not even on your side the road, lady.”
“There ain’t a thing you can do about it,” Mrs. Pritchard hissed loudly. The child was sitting on the back seat close to the side. She had a furious outraged look on her face but she kept her head drawn back from the window so that they couldn’t see her.
Mrs. Cope spoke slowly, emphasizing every word. “I think I have been very nice to you boys. I’ve fed you twice. Now I’m going into town and if you’re still here when I come back, I’ll call the sheriff,” and with this, she drove off. The child, turning quickly so that she could see out the back window, observed that they had not moved; they had not even turned their heads.
“You done angered them now,” Mrs. Pritchard said, “and it ain’t any telling what they’ll do.”
“They’ll be gone when we get back,” Mrs. Cope said.
Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium. “I known a man oncet that his wife was poisoned by a child she had adopted out of pure kindness,” she said. When they returned from town, the boys were not on the embankment and she said, “I would rather to see them than not to see them. When you see them you know what they’re doing.”
“Ridiculous,” Mrs. Cope muttered. “I’ve scared them and they’ve gone and now we can forget them.”
“I ain’t forgetting them,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “I wouldn’t be none surprised if they didn’t have a gun in that there suitcase.”
Mrs. Cope prided herself on the way she handled the type of mind that Mrs. Pritchard had. When Mrs. Pritchard saw signs and omens, she exposed them calmly for the figments of imagination that they were, but this afternoon her nerves were taut and she said, “Now I’ve had about enough of this. Those boys are gone and that’s that.”
“Well, we’ll wait and see,” Mrs. Pritchard said.
Everything was quiet for the rest of the afternoon but at supper time, Mrs. Pritchard came over to say that she had heard a high vicious laugh pierce out of the bushes near the hog pen. It was an evil laugh, full of calculated meanness, and she had heard it come three times, herself, distinctly.
“I haven’t heard a thing,” Mrs. Cope said.
“I look for them to strike just after dark,” Mrs. Pritchard said.
That night Mrs. Cope and the child sat on the porch until nearly ten o’clock and nothing happened. The only sounds came from tree frogs and from one whippoorwill who called faster and faster from the same spot of darkness, “They’ve gone,” Mr. Cope said, “poor things,” and she began to tell the child how milch they had to be thankful for, for she said they might have had to live in a development themselves or they might have been Negroes or they might have been in iron lungs or they might have been Europeans ridden in boxcars like cattle, and she began a litany of her blessings, in a stricken voice, that the child, straining her attention for a sudden shriek in the dark, didn’t listen to.
There was no sign of them the next morning either. The fortress line of trees was a hard granite blue, the wind had risen overnight and the sun had come up a pale gold. The sea ion was changing. Even a small change in the weather made Mrs. Cope thankful, but when the seasons changed she seemed almost frightened at her good fortune in escaping whatever it was that pursued her. As she sometimes did when one thing was finished and another about to begin, she turned her attention to the child who had put on a pair of overalls over her dress and had pulled a man’s old felt hat down as far as it would go on her head and was arming herself with two pistols in a decorated holster that she had fastened around her waist. The hat was very tight and seemed to be squeezing the redness into her face. It came down almost to the tops of her glasses. Mrs. Cope watched her with a tragic look. “Why do you have to look like an idiot?” she asked. “Suppose company were to cone? When are you going to grow up? What’s going to become of you? I look at you and I want to cry! Sometimes you look like you might belong to Mrs. Pritchard!”
“Leave me be,” the child said in a high irritated voice. “Leave me be. Just leave me be. I ain’t you,” and she went into the woods as if she were stalking out an enemy, her head thrust forward and each hand gripped on a gun.
Mrs. Pritchard came over, sour-humored, because she didn’t have anything calamitous to report. “I got the misery in my face today,” she said, holding on to what she could salvage. “Theseyer teeth. They each one feel like an individual boil.”
The child crashed through the woods, making the fallen leaves sound ominous under her feet. The sun had risen a little and was only a white hole like an opening for the wind to escape through in a sky a little darker than itself, and the tops of the trees were black against the glare. “I’m going to get you one by one and beat you black and blue. Line up. LINE UP!” she said and waved one of the pistols at a cluster of long bare-trunked pines, four times her height, as she passed them. She kept moving, muttering and growling to herself and occasionally hitting out with one of the guns at a branch that got in her way. From time to time she stopped to remove the thorn vine that caught in her shirt and she would say, “Leave me be, I told you. Leave me be,” and give it a crack with the pistol and then stalk on.
Presently she sat down on a stump to cool off but she planted both feet carefully and firmly on the ground. She lifted them and put them down several times, grinding them fiercely into the dirt as if she were crushing something under her heels. Suddenly she heard a laugh.
She sat up, prickle-skinned. It came again. She heard the sound of splashing and she stood up, uncertain which way to run. She was not far from where this patch of woods ended and the back pasture began. She eased toward the pasture, careful not to make a sound, and coming suddenly to the edge of it, she saw the three boys, not twenty feet away, washing in the cow trough. Their clothes were piled against the black valise out of reach of the water that flowed over the side of the tank. The large boy was standing up and the small one was trying to climb onto his shoulders. Powell was sitting down looking straight ahead through glasses that were splashed with water. He was not paying any attention to the other two. The trees must have looked like green waterfalls through his wet glasses. The child stood partly hidden behind a pine trunk, the side of her face pressed into the bark.
“I wish I lived here!” the little boy shouted, balancing with his knees clutched around the big one’s head.
“I’m goddam glad I don’t,” the big boy panted, and jumped up to dislodge him.
Powell sat without moving, without seeming to know that the other two were behind him, and looked straight ahead like a ghost sprung upright in his coffin. “If this place was not here any more,” he said, “you would never have to think of it again.”
“Listen,” the big boy said, sitting down quietly in the water with the little one still moored to his shoulders, “it don’t belong to nobody.”
“It’s ours,” the little boy said.
The child behind the tree did not move.
Powell jumped out of the trough and began to run. He ran all the way around the field as if something were atter him and as he passed the tank again, the other two jumped out and raced with him, the sun glinting on their long wet bodies. The big one ran the fastest and was the leader. They dashed around the field twice and finally dropped down by their clothes and lay there with their ribs moving up and down. After a while, the big one said hoarsely, “Do you know what I would do with this place if I had the chance?”
“No, what?” the little boy said and sat up to give him his full attention.
“I’d build a big parking lot on it, or something,” he muttered.
They began to dress. The sun made two white spots an Powell’s glasses and blotted out his eyes. “I know what let’s do,” he said. He took something small from his pocket and showed it to them. For almost a minute they sat looking at what he had til his hand. Then without any more discussion, Powell picked up the suitcase and they got up and moved past the child and entered the woods not ten feet from where she was standing, slightly away from the tree now, with the imprint of the bark embossed red and white on the side of her face.
She watched with a dazed stare as they stopped and collected all the matches they had between them and began to, set the brush on fire. They began to whoop and holler and beat their hands over their mouths and in a few seconds there was a narrow line of fire widening between her and them. While she watched, it reached up from the brush, snatching and biting at the lowest branches of the trees. The wind carried rags of it higher and the boys disappeared shrieking behind it.
She turned and tried to run across the field but her legs were too heavy and she stood there, weighted down with some new unplaced misery that she had never felt before. But finally she began to run.
Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard were in the field behind the barn when Mrs. Cope saw smoke rising from the woods across the pasture. She shrieked and Mrs. Pritchard pointed up the road to where the child came loping heavily, screaming, “Mama, Mama, they’re going to build a parking lot here!”
Mrs. Cope began to scream for the Negroes while Mrs. Pritchard, charged now, ran down the road shouting. Mr. Pritchard came out of the open end of the barn and the two Negroes stopped filling the manure spreader in the lot and started toward Mrs. Cope with their shovels. “Hurry, hurry!” she shouted. “Start throwing dirt on it!” They passed her almost without looking at her and headed off slowly across the field toward the smoke. She ran after them a little way, shrilling, “Hurry, hurry, don’t you see it! Don’t you see it!”
“It’ll be there when we git there,” Culver said and they thrust their shoulders forward a little and went on at the same pace.
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroes’ ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.
The Displaced Person (1954)
THE PEACOCK was following Mrs. Shortley up the road to the hill where she meant to stand. Moving one behind the other, they looked like a complete procession. Her arms were folded and as she mounted the prominence, she might have been the giant wife of the countryside, come out at some sign of danger to see what the trouble was. She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything. She ignored the white afternoon sun which was creeping behind a ragged wall of cloud as if it pretended to be an intruder and cast her gaze down the red clay road that turned off from the highway.
The peacock stopped just behind her, his tail—glittering greengold and blue in the sunlight—lifted just enough so that it would not touch the ground. It flowed out on either side like a floating train and his head on the long blue reedlike neck was drawn back as if his attention were fixed in the distance on something no one else could see.
Mrs. Shortley was watching a black car turn through the gate from the highway. Over by the toolshed, about fifteen feet away, the two Negroes, Astor and Sulk, had stopped work to watch. They were hidden by a mulberry tree but Mrs. Shortley knew they were there.
Mrs. Mcintyre was coming down the steps of her house to meet the car. She had on her largest smile but Mrs. Shortley, even from her distance, could detect a nervous slide in it. These people who were coming were only hired help, like the Shortleys themselves or the Negroes. Yet here was the owner of the place out to welcome them. Here she was, wearing her best clothes and a string of beads, and now bounding forward with her mouth stretched.
The car stopped at the walk just as she did and the priest was the first to get out. He was a long-legged black-suited old man with a white hat on and a collar that he wore backwards, which, Mrs. Shortley knew, was what priests did who wanted to be known as priests. It was this priest who had arranged for these people to come here. He opened the back door of the car and out jumped two children, a boy and a girl, and then, stepping more slowly, a woman in brown, shaped like a peanut. Then the front door opened and out stepped the man, the Displaced Person. He was short and a little swaybacked and wore gold-rimmed spectacles.
Mrs. Shortley’s vision narrowed on him and then widened to include the woman and the two children in a group picture. The first thing that struck her as very peculiar was that they looked like other people. Every time she had seen then in her imagination, the image she had got was of the three bears, walking single file, with wooden shoes on like Dutchmen and sailor hats and bright coats with a lot of buttons. But the woman had on a dress she might have worn herself and the children wen’ dressed like anybody from around. The man had on khaki pants and a blue shirt. Suddenly, as Mrs. McIntyre held out her hands to him, he bobbed down from the waist and kissed it.
Mrs. Shortley jerked her own hand up toward her mouth and then after a second brought it down and rubbed it vigorously on her seat. If Mr. Shortley had tried to kiss her hand Mrs. McIntyre would have knocked him into the middle of next week, but then Mr. Shortley wouldn’t have kissed her hand anyway. He didn’t have time to mess around.
She looked closer, squinting. The boy was in the center of the group, talking. He was supposed to speak the most English because he had learned some in Poland and so he was to listen to his father’s Polish and say it in English and then listen to Mrs. McIntyre’s English and say that in Polish. The priest had told Mrs. McIntyre his name was Rudolph and he was twelve and the girl’s name was Sledgewig and she was nine. Sledgewig sounded to Mrs. Shortley like something you would name a bug, or vice versa as if you named a boy Bollweevil. All of them’s last name was something that only they themselves and the priest could pronounce. All she could make out of it was Gobblehook. She and Mrs. Mcintyre had been calling them the Gobblehooks all week while they got ready for them.
There had been a great deal to do to get ready for them because they didn’t have anything of their own, not a stick of furniture or a sheet or a dish, and everything had had to be scraped together out of things that Mrs. McIntyre couldn’t use anymore herself. They had collected a piece of odd furniture here and a piece there and they had taken some flowered chicken feed sacks and made curtains for the windows, two red and one green, because they had not had enough of the red sacks to go around. Mrs. McIntyre said she was not made of money and she could not afford to buy curtains. “They can’t talk,” Mrs. Shortley said. “You reckon they’ll know what colors even is?” and Mrs. McIntyre had said that after what those people had been through, they should be grateful for anything they could get. She said to think how lucky they were to escape from over there and come to a place like this.
Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying, “Time marches on!” This was the kind of thing that was happening every day in Europe where they had not advanced as in this country, and watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others? The width and breadth of this question nearly shook her. Her stomach trembled as if there had been a slight quake in the heart of the mountain and automatically she moved down from her elevation and went forward to be introduced to them, as if she meant to find out at once what they were capable of.
She approached, stomach foremost, head back, arms folded, boots flopping gently against her large legs. About fifteen feet from the gesticulating group, she stopped and made her presence felt by training her gaze on the back of Mrs. Mcintyre’s neck. Mrs. Mcintyre was a small woman of sixty with a round wrinkled face and red bangs that came almost down to two high orange-colored penciled eyebrows. She had a little doll’s mouth and eyes that were a soft blue when she opened them wide but more like steel or granite when she narrowed them to inspect a milk can. She had buried one husband and divorced two and Mrs. Shortley respected her as a person nobody had put anything over on yet—except, ha, ha, perhaps the Shortleys. She held out her arm in Mrs. Shortley’s direction and said to the Rudolph boy, “And this is Mrs. Shortley. Mr. Shortley is my dairyman. Where’s Mr. Shortley,” she asked as his wife began to approach again, her arms still folded. “I want him to meet the Guizacs.”
Now it was Guizac. She wasn’t calling them Gobblehook to their face. “Chancey’s at the barn,” Mrs. Shortley said. “He don’t have time to rest himself in the bushes like them niggers over there.”
Her look first grazed the tops of the displaced people’s heads and then revolved downwards slowly, the way a buzzard glides and drops in the air until it alights on the carcass. She stood far enough away so that the man would not be able to kiss her hand. He looked directly at her with little green eyes and gave her a broad grin that was toothless on one side. Mrs. Shortley, without smiling, turned her attention to the little girl who stood by the mother, swinging her shoulders from side to side. She had long braided hair in two looped pigtails and there was no denying she was a pretty child even if she did have a bug’s name. She was better looking than either Annie Maude or Sarah Mae, Mrs. Shortleys two girls going on fifteen and seventeen but Annie Maude had never got her growth and Sarah Mae had a cast in her eye. She compared the foreign boy to her son, H. C., and H. C. came out far ahead. H. C. was twenty years old with her build and eyeglasses. He was going to Bible school now and when he finished he was going to start him a church. He had a strong sweet voice for hymns and could sell anything. Mrs. Shortley looked at the priest and was reminded that these people did not have an advanced religion. There was no telling what all they believed since none of the foolishness had been reformed out of it. Again she saw the room piled high with bodies.
The priest spoke in a foreign way himself, English but as if he had a throatful of hay. He had a big nose and a bald rectangular face and head. While she was observing him, his large mouth dropped open and with a stare behind her, he said, “Arrrrrrr!” and pointed.
Mrs. Shortley spun around. The peacock was standing a few feet behind her, with his head slightly cocked.
“What a beautiful birdrrrd!” the priest murmured.
“Another mouth to feed,” Mrs. Mcintyre said, glancing in the peafowl’s direction.
“And when does he raise his splendid tail?” Asked the priest.
“Just when it suits him,” she said. “There used to be twenty or thirty of those things on the place but I’ve let them die off. I don’t like to hear them scream in the middle of the night.”
“So beautiful,” the priest said. “A tail full of suns,” and he crept forward on tiptoe and looked down on the bird’s back where the polished gold and green design began. The peacock stood still as if he had just come down from some sun-drenched height to be a vision for them all. The priest’s homely red face hung over him, glowing with pleasure.
Mrs. Shortley’s mouth had drawn acidly to one side. “Nothing but a peachicken,” she muttered.
Mrs. Mcintyre raised her orange eyebrows and exchanged a look with her to indicate that the old man was in his second childhood. “Well, we must show the Guizacs their new home,” she said impatiently and she herded them into the car again. The peacock stepped off toward the mulberry tree where the two Negroes were hiding and the priest turned his absorbed face away and got in the car and drove the displaced people down to the shack they were to occupy.
Mrs. Shortley waited until the car was out of sight and then she made her way circuitously to the mulberry tree and stood about ten feet behind the two Negroes, one an old man holding a bucket half full of calf feed and the other a yellowish boy with a short woodchuck-like head pushed into a rounded felt hat. “Well,” she said slowly, “yawl have looked long enough. What you think about them?”
The old man, Astor, raised himself. “We been watching,” he said as if this would be news to her. “Who they now?”
“They come from over the water,” Mrs. Shortley said with a wave of her arm. “They’re what is called Displaced Persons.”
“Displaced Persons,” he said. “Well now. I declare. What do that mean?”
“It means they ain’t where they were born at and there’s nowhere for them to go—like if you was run out of here and wouldn’t nobody have you.”
“It seem like they here, though,” the old man said in a reflective voice. “If they here, they somewhere.”
“Sho is,” the other agreed. “They here.”
The illogic of Negro-thinking always irked Mrs. Shortley. “They ain’t where they belong to be at,” she said. “They belong to be back over yonder where everything is still like they been used to. Over here it’s more advanced than where they come from. But yawl better look out now,” she said and nodded her head. “There’s about ten million billion more just like them and I know what Mrs. McIntyre said.”
“Say what?” the young one asked.
“Places are not easy to get nowadays, for white or black, but I reckon I heard what she stated to me,” she said in a sing-song voice.
“You liable to hear most anything,” the old man remarked, leaning forward as if he were about to walk off but holding himself suspended.
“I heard her say, ‘This is going to put the Fear of the Lord into those shiftless niggers!’” Mrs. Shortley said in a ringing voice.
The old man started off. “She say something like that every now and then,” he said. “Ha, Ha. Yes indeed.”
“You better get on in that barn and help Mr. Shortley,” she said to the other one. “What you reckon she pays you for?”
“He the one sent me out,” the Negro muttered. “He the one gimme something else to do.”
“Well you better get to doing it then,” she said and stood there until he moved off. Then she stood a while longer, reflecting, her unseeing eyes directly in front of the peacock’s tail. He had jumped into the tree and his tail hung in front of her, full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed in green and set against a sun that was gold in one second’s light and salmon-colored in the next. She might have been looking at a map of the universe but she didn’t notice it any more than she did the spots of sky that cracked the dull green of the tree. She was having an inner vision instead. She was seeing the ten million billion of them pushing their way into new places over here and herself, a giant angel with wings as wide as a house, telling the Negroes that they would have to find another place. She turned herself in the direction of the barn, musing on this, her expression lofty and satisfied.
She approached the barn from an oblique angle that allowed her a look in the door before she could be seen herself. Mr. Chancey Shortley was adjusting the last milking machine on a large black and white spotted cow near the entrance, squatting at her heels. There was about a half-inch of cigarette adhering to the center of his lower lip. Mrs. Shortley observed it minutely for half a second. “If she seen or heard of you smoking in this barn, she would blow a fuse,” she said.
Mr. Shortley raised a sharply rutted face containing a washout under each cheek and two long crevices eaten down both sides of his blistered mouth. “You gonter be the one to tell her?” he asked.
“She’s got a nose of her own,” Mrs. Shortley said.
Mr. Shortley, without: appearing to give the feat any consideration, lifted the cigarette stub with the sharp end of his tongue, drew it into his mouth, closed his lips tightly, rose, stepped out, gave his wife a good round appreciative stare, and spit the smoldering butt into the grass.
“Aw Chancey,” she said, “haw haw,” and she dug a little hole for it with her toe and covered it up. This trick of Mr. Shortley’s was actually his way of making love to her. When he had done his courting, he had not brought a guitar to strum or anything pretty for her to keep, but had sat on her porch steps, not saying a word, imitating a paralyzed man propped up to enjoy a cigarette. When the cigarette got the proper size, he would turn his eyes to her and open his mouth and draw in the butt and then sit there as if he had swallowed it, looking at her with the most loving look anybody could imagine. It nearly drove her wild and every time he did it, she wanted to pull his hat down over his eyes and hug him to death.
“Well,” she said, going into the barn after him, “the Gobblehooks have come and she wants you to meet them, says, ‘Where’s Mr. Shortley?’ and I says, ‘He don’t have time…’”
“Tote up them weights,” Mr. Shortley said, squatting to the cow again.
“You reckon he can drive a tractor when he don’t know English?” she asked. “I don’t think she’s going to get her money’s worth out of them. That boy can talk but he looks delicate. The one can work can’t talk and the one can talk can’t work. She ain’t any better off than if she had more niggers.’
“I rather have a nigger if it was me,” Mr. Shortley said.
“She says it’s ten million more like them. Displaced Persons, she says that there priest can get her all she wants.”
“She better quit messin with that there priest,” Mr. Shortley said.
“He don’t look smart,” Mrs. Shortley said, “—kind of foolish.”
“I ain’t going to have the Pope of Rome tell me how to run no dairy,” Mr. Shortley said.
“They ain’t Eye-talians, they’re Poles,” she said. “From Poland where all them bodies were stacked up at. You remember all them bodies?”
“I give them three weeks here,” Mr. Shortley said.
Three weeks later Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley drove to the cane bottom to see Mr. Guizac start to operate the silage cutter, a new machine that Mrs. McIntyre had just bought because she said, for the first time, she had somebody who could operate it. Mr. Guizac could drive a tractor, use the rotary hay-baler, the silage cutter, the combine, the letz mill, or any other machine she had on the place. He was an expert mechanic, a carpenter, and a mason. He was thrifty and energetic. Mrs. McIntyre said she figured he would save her twenty dollars a month on repair bills alone. She said getting him was the best day’s work she had ever done in her life. He could work milking machines and he was scrupulously clean. He did not smoke.
She parked her car on the edge of the cane field and they got out. Sulk, the young Negro, was attaching the wagon to the cutter and Mr. Guizac was attaching the cutter to the tractor. He finished first and pushed the colored boy out of the way and attached the wagon to the cutter himself, gesticulating with a bright angry face when he wanted the hammer or the screwdriver. Nothing was done quick enough to suit him. The Negroes made him nervous.
The week before, he had come upon Sulk at the dinner hour, sneaking with a croker sack into the pen where the young turkeys were. He had watched him take a frying-size turkey from the lot and thrust it in the sack and put the sack under his coat. Then he had followed him around the barn, jumped on him, dragged him to Mrs. McIntyre’s back door and had acted out the entire scene for her, while the Negro muttered and grumbled and said God might strike him dead if he had been stealing any turkey, he had only been taking it to put some black shoe polish on its head because it had the sorehead. God might strike him dead if that was not the truth before Jesus. Mrs. McIntyre told him to go put the turkey back and then she was a long time explaining to the Pole that all Negroes would steal. She finally had to call Rudolph and tell him in English and have him tell his father in Polish, and Mr. Guizac had gone off with a startled disappointed face.
Mrs. Shortley stood by hoping there would be trouble with the silage machine but there was none. All of Mr. Cuizac’s motions were quick and accurate. He jumped on the tractor like a monkey and maneuvered the big orange cutter into the lane; in a second the silage was spurting in a green jet out of the pipe into the wagon. He went jolting down the row until his disappeared from sight and the noise became remote.
Mrs. McIntyre sighed with pleasure. “At Last,” she said, “I’ve got somebody I can depend on. For years I’ve been fooling with sorry people. Sorry people. Poor white trash and niggers,” she muttered. “They’ve drained me dry. Before you all came I had Ringfields and Collins and Jarrells and Perkins and Pinkins and Herrins and God knows what all else and not a one of them left without taking something off this place that didn’t belong to them. Not a one!”
Mrs. Shortley could listen to this with composure because she knew that if Mrs. McIntyre had considered her trash, they couldn’t have talked about trashy people together. Neither of them approved of trash. Mrs. McIntyre continued with the monologue that Mrs. Shortley had heard oftentimes before. “I’ve been running this place for thirty years,” she said, looking with a deep frown out over the field, “and always just barely making it. People think you’re made of money. I have taxes to pay. I have the insurance to keep up. I have the repair bills. I have the feed bills.” It all gathered up and she stood with her chest lifted and her small hands gripped around her elbows. “Ever since the Judge died,” she said, “I’ve barely been making ends meet and they all take something when they leave. The niggers don’t leave—they stay and steal. A nigger thinks anybody is rich he can steal from and that white trash thinks anybody is rich who can afford to hire people as sorry as they are. And all I’ve got is the dirt under my feet!”
You hire and fire, Mrs. Shortley thought, but she didn’t always say what she thought. She stood by and let Mrs. McIntyre say it all out to the end but this time it didn’t end as usual. “But at last I’m saved!” Mrs. McIntyre said. “One fellow’s misery is the other fellow’s gain. That man there,” and she pointed where the Displaced Person had disappeared, “—he has to work! He wants to work!” She turned to Mrs. Shortley with her bright wrinkled face. “That man is my salvation!” she said.
Mrs. Shortley looked straight ahead as if her vision penetrated the cane and the hill and pierced through to the other side. “I would suspicion salvation got from the devil,” she said in a slow detached way.
“Now what do you mean by that?” Mrs. McIntyre asked, looking at her sharply.
Mrs. Shortley wagged her head but would not say anything else. The fact was she had nothing else to say for this intuition had only at that instant come to her. She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it. For people like herself, for people of gumption, it was a social occasion providing the opportunity to sing; but if she had ever given it much thought, she would have considered the devil the head of it and God the hanger-on. With the coming of these displaced people, she was obliged to give new thought to a good many things.
“I know what Sledgewig told Annie Maude” she said, and when Mrs. McIntyre carefully did not ask her what but reached down and broke off a sprig of sassafras to chew, she continued in a way to indicate she was not telling all, “that they wouldn’t be able to live long, the four of them, on seventy dollars a month.”
“He’s worth raising,” Mrs. McIntyre said. “He saves me money.”
This was as much as to say that Chancey had never saved her money. Chancey got up at four in the morning to milk her cows, in winter wind and summer heat, and he had been doing it for the last two years. They had been with her the longest she had ever had anybody. The gratitude they got was these hints that she hadn’t been saved any money.
“Is Mr. Shortley feeling better today?” Mrs. McIntyre asked.
Mrs. Shortley thought it was about time she was asking that question. Mr. Shortley had been in bed two days with an attack. Mr. Guizac had taken his place in the dairy in addition to doing his own work. “No he ain’t,” she said. “That doctor said he was suffering from over-exhaustion.”
“If Mr. Shortley is over-exhausted,” Mrs. McIntyre said, “then he must have a second job on the side,” and she looked at Mrs. Shortley with almost closed eyes as if she were examining the bottom of a milk can.
Mrs. Shortley did not say a word but her dark suspicion grew like a black thunder cloud. The fact was that Mr. Shortley did have a second job on the side and that, in a free country, this was none of Mrs. McIntyre’s business. Mr. Shortley made whisky. He had a small still back in the farthest reaches of the place, on Mrs. McIntyre’s land to be sure, but on land that she only owned and did not cultivate, on idle land that was not doing anybody any good. Mr. Shortley was not afraid of work. He got up at four in the morning and milked her cows and in the middle of the day when he was supposed to be resting, he was off attending to his still. Not every man would work like that. The Negroes knew about his still but he knew about theirs so there had never been any disagreeableness between them. But with foreigners on the place, with people who were all eyes and no understanding, who had come from a place continually fighting, where the religion had not been reformed—with this kind of people, you had to be on the lookout every minute. She thought there ought to be a law against them. There was no reason they couldn’t stay over there and take the places of some of the people who had been killed in their wars and butcherings.
“What’s furthermore,” she said suddenly, “Sledgewig said as soon as her papa saved the money, he was going to buy him a used car. Once they get them a used car, they’ll leave you.”
“I can’t pay him enough for him to save money,” Mrs. McIntyre said. “I’m not worrying about that. Of course,” she said then, “if Mr. Shortley got incapacitated, I would have to use Mr. Guizac in the dairy all the time and I would have to pay him more. He doesn’t smoke,” she said, and it was the fifth time within the week that she had pointed this out.
“It is no man,” Mrs. Shortley said emphatically, “that works as hard as Chancey, or is as easy with a cow, or is more of a Christian,” and she folded her arms and her gaze pierced the distance. The noise of the tractor and cutter increased and Mr. Guizac appeared coming around the other side of the cane row. “Which can not be said about everybody,” she muttered. She wondered whether, if the Pole found Chancey’s still, he would know what it was. The trouble with these people was, you couldn’t tell what they knew. Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station.
The tractor, the cutter, the wagon passed, rattling and rumbling and grinding before them. “Think how long that would have taken with men and mules to do it,” Mrs. McIntyre shouted. “We’ll get this whole bottom cut within two days at this rate.”
“Maybe,” Mrs. Shortley muttered, “if don’t no terrible accident occur.” She thought how the tractor had made mules worthless. Nowadays you couldn’t give away a mule. The next thing to go, she reminded herself, will be niggers.
In the afternoon she explained what was going to happen to them to Astor and Sulk who were in the cow lot, filling the manure spreader. She sat down next to the block of salt under a small shed, her stomach in her lap, her arms on top of it. “All you colored people better look out,” she said. “You know how much you can get for a mule.”
“Nothing, no indeed,” the old man said, “not one thing.”
“Before it was a tractor,” she said, “it could be a mule. And before it was a Displaced Person, it could be a nigger. The time is going to come,” she prophesied, “when it won’t be no more occasion to speak of a nigger.”
The old man laughed politely. “Yes indeed” he said. “Ha ha.”
The young one didn’t say anything. He only looked sullen but when she had gone in the house, he said, “Big Belly act like she know everything.”
“Never mind,” the old man said, “your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.”
She didn’t tell her fears about the still to Mr. Shortley until he was back on the job in the dairy. Then one night after they were in bed, she said, “That man prowls.”
Mr. Shortley folded his hands on his bony chest and pretended he was a corpse.
“Prowls,” she continued and gave him a sharp kick in the side with her knee. “Who’s to say what they know and don’t know? Who’s to say if he found it he wouldn’t go right to her and tell? How you know they don’t make liquor in Europe? They drive tractors. They got them all kinds of machinery. Answer me.”
“Don’t worry me now,” Mr. Shortlev said. “I’m a dead man.”
“It’s them little eyes of his that’s foreign.” She muttered. “And that way he’s got of shrugging.” She drew her shoulders up and shrugged several times. “How come he’s got everything to shrug about?” she asked.
“If everybody was as dead as I am, nobody would have no trouble,” Mr. Shortley said.
“That priest,” she muttered and was silent or a minute. Then she said, “In Europe they probably got some different way to make liquor but I reckon they know all the ways. They’re full of crooked ways. They never have advanced or reformed. They got the same religion as a thousand years ago. It could only be the devil responsible for that. Always fighting amongst each other. Disputing. And then get us into it. Ain’t they got us into it twict already and we ain’t got no more sense than to go over there and settle it for them and then they come on back over here and snoop around and find your still and go straight to her. And liable to kiss her hand any minute. Do you hear me?”
“No,” Mr. Shortley said.
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” she said. ‘ I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he don’t know everything you say. whether it be in English or not.”
“I don’t speak no other language,” Mr. Shortley murmured.
“I suspect,” she said, “that before long there won’t be no more niggers on this place. And I tell you what. I’d rather have niggers than them Poles. And what’s furthermore, I aim to take up for the niggers when the time comes. When Gobblehook first come here, you recollect how he shook their hands. like he didn’t know the difference, like he might have been as black as them, but when it come to finding out Sulk was taking turkeys, he gone on and told her. I known he was taking turkeys. I could have told her myself.”
Mr. Shortley was breathing softly as if he were asleep.
“A nigger don’t know when he has a friend,” She said. “And I’ll tell you another thing. I get a heap out of Sledgewig. Sledgewig said that in Poland they lived in a brick house and one night a man come and told them to get out of it before daylight. Do you believe they ever lived in a brick house?
“Airs,” she said. “That’s Just airs. A wooden house is good enough for me. Chancey,” she said, “turn thisaway”, I hate to see niggers mistreated and run out. I have a heap of pity for niggers and poor folks. Ain’t I always had?” she asked. “I say ain’t I always been a friend to niggers and poor folk?
“When the time comes,” she said, “I’ll stand up for the niggers and that’s that. I ain’t going to see that priest drive out all the niggers.”
Mrs. McIntyre bought a new drag harrow and a tractor with a power lift because she said, for the first time, she had some one who could handle machinery. She and Mrs Shortley had driven to the back field to inspect what he had harrowed the day before. “That’s been done beautifully!” Mrs. McIntyre said, looking out over he red undulating ground.
Mrs. McIntyre had changed since the t Displaced Person had working for her and Mrs. Shortley had observed the change very closely: she had begun to act like somebody who was getting rich secretly and she didn’t confide in Mrs. Shortley the way she used to. Mrs. Shortley suspected that the priest was at the bottom of the change. They were very slick. First he would get her into his Church and then he would get his hand in her pocketbook. Well, Mrs. Shortley thought, the more fool she! Mrs. Shortley had a secret herself. She knew something the Displaced Person was doing that would floor Mrs. McIntyre. “I still say he ain’t going to work forever for seventy dollars a month,” she murmured. She intended to keep her secret to herself and Mr. Shortley.
“Well,” Mrs. McIntyre said, “I may have to get rid of some of this other help so I can pay him more.”
Mrs. Shortley nodded to indicate she had known this for some time. ‘ ‘I’m not saying those niggers ain’t had it coming,” she said. “But they do the best they know how. You can always tell a nigger what to do and stand by until he does it.”
“That’s what the Judge said,” Mrs. McIntyre said and looked at her with approval. The Judge was her first husband, the one who had left her the place. Mrs. Shortley had heard that she had married him when she was thirty and he was seventy-five, thinking she would be rich as soon as he died, but the old man was a scoundrel and when his estate was settled, they found he didn’t have a nickel. All he left her were the fifty acres and the house. But she always spoke of him in a reverent way and quoted his sayings, such as, “One fellow’s misery is the other fellow’s gain,” and “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.”
“However,” Mrs. Shortley remarked, “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” and she had to turn away so that Mrs. McIntyre would not see her smile. She had found out what the Displaced Person was up to through the old man, Astor, and she had not told anybody but Mr. Shortley. Mr. Shortley had risen straight up in bed like Lazarus from the tomb.
“Shut your mouth!” he had said.
“Yes,” she had said.
“Naw!” Mr. Shortley had said.
“Yes,” she had said.
Mr. Shortley had fallen back flat.
“The Pole don’t know any better,” Mrs. Shortley had said. “I reckon that priest is putting him up to it is all. I blame the priest.”
The priest came frequently to see the Guizacs and he would always stop in and visit Mrs. McIntyre too and they would walk around the place and she would point out her improvements and listen to his rattling talk. It suddenly came to Mrs. Shortley that he was trying to persuade her to bring another Polish family onto the place. With two of them here, there would be almost nothing spoken but Polish! The Negroes would be gone and there would be the two families against Mr. Shortley and herself! She began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel. God save me, she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan! And she started from that day to read her Bible with a new attention. She poured over the Apocalypse and began to quote from the Prophets and before long she had come to a deeper understanding of her existence. She saw plainly that the meaning of the world was a mystery that had been planned and she was not surprised to suspect that she had a special part in the plan because she was strong. She saw that the Lord God Almighty had created the strong people to do what had to be done and she felt that she would be ready when she was called. Right now she felt that her business was to watch the priest.
His visits irked her more and more. On the last one, he went about picking up feathers off the ground. He found two peacock feathers and four or five turkey feathers and an old brown hen feather and took them off with him like a bouquet. This foolish acting did not deceive Mrs. Shanley any. Here he was: leading foreigners over in hordes to places that were not theirs, to cause disputes, to uproot niggers, to plant the Whore of Babylon in the midst of the righteous! Whenever he came on the place, she hid herself behind something and watched until he left.
It was on a Sunday afternoon that she had her vision. She had gone to drive in the cows for Mr. Shortley who had a pain in his knee and she was walking slowly through the pasture, her arms folded, her eyes on the distant lowlying clouds that looked like rows and rows of white fish washed up on a great blue beach. She paused after an incline to heave a sigh of exhaustion for she had an immense weight to carry around and she was not as young as she used to be. At times she could feel her heart, like a child’s fist, clenching and unclenching inside her chest, aid when the feeling came, it stopped her thought altogether and she would go about like a large hull of herself, moving for no reason; but she gained this incline without a tremor and stood at the top of it, pleased with herself. Suddenly while she watched, the sky folded back in two pieces like the curtain to a stage and a gigantic” figure stood facing her. It was the color of the sun in the early afternoon, white-gold. It was of no definite shape but there were fiery, wheels with fierce dark eyes in them, spinning rapidly all around it. She was not able to tell if the figure was going forward or backward because its magnificence was so great. She shut her eyes in order to look at it and it turned blood-red and the wheels turned white. A voice, very resonant, said the one word, “Prophesy!”
She stood there, tottering slightly but still upright, her eyes shut tight and her fists clenched and her straw hat low on her forehead. “The children of wicked nations will be butchered,” she said in a loud voice. “Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of hand. Who will remain whole? Who will remain whole? Who?”
Presently she opened her eyes. The sky was full of white fish carried lazily on their sides by some invisible current and pieces of the sun, submerged some distance beyond them, appeared from time to time as if they were being washed in the opposite direction. Woodenly she planted one foot in front of the other until she had crossed the pasture and reached the lot. She walked through the barn like one in a daze and did not speak to Mr. Shortley. She continued up the road until she saw the priest’s car parked in front of Mrs. McIntyre’s house. “Here again,” she muttered. “Come to destroy.”
Mrs. McIntyre and the priest were walking in the yard. In order not to meet them face to face, she turned to the left and entered the feed house, a single-room shack piled on one side with flowered sacks of scratch feed. There were spilled oyster shells in one corner and a few old dirty calendars on the wall, advertising calf feed and various patent medicine remedies. One showed a bearded gentleman in a frock coat, holding up a bottle, and beneath his feet was the inscription, “I have been made regular by this marvelous discovery.” Mrs. Shortley had always felt close to this man as if he were some distinguished person she was acquainted with but now her mind was on nothing but the dangerous presence of the priest. She stationed herself at a crack between two boards where she could look out and see him and Mrs. McIntyre strolling toward the turkey brooder, which was placed just outside the feed house.
“Arrrrr!” he said as they approached the brooder. “Look at the little biddies!” and he stooped and squinted through the wire.
Mrs. Shortley’s mouth twisted.
” Do you think the Guizacs will want to leave me?” Mrs. McIntyre asked. “Do you think they’ll go to Chicago or some place like that?”
“And why should they do that now?” asked the priest, wiggling his finger at a turkey, his big nose close to the wire.
“Money,” Mrs. McIntyre said.
“Arrrr, give them some morrre then,” he said indifferently. “They have to get along.”
“So do I,” Mrs. McIntyre muttered. “It means I’m going to have to get rid of some of these others.”
“And arrre the ShortIeys satisfactory?” he inquired, paying more attention to the turkeys than to her.
“Five times in the last month I’ve found Mr. Shortley smoking in the barn,” Mrs. McIntyre said. “Five times.”
“And arrre the Negroes any better?”
“They lie and steal and have to be watched all the time,” she said.
“Tsk, tsk,” he said. “Which will you discharge?’
“I’ve decided to give Mr. Shortley his month’s notice tomorrow,” Mrs. McIntyre said.
The priest scarcely seemed to hear her he was so busy wiggling his finger inside the wire. Mrs. Shortley sat down on an open sack of laying mash with a dead thump that sent feed dust clouding up around her. She found herself looking straight ahead at the opposite wall where the gentleman on the calendar was holding up his marvelous discovery but she didn’t see him. She looked ahead as if she saw nothing whatsoever. Then she rose and ran to her house. Her face was an almost volcanic red.
She opened all the drawers and dragged out boxes and old battered suitcases from under the bed. She began to unload the drawers into the boxes, all the time without pause, without taking off the sunhat she had on her head. She set the two girls to doing the same. When Mr. Shortley came in, she did not even look at him but merely pointed one arm at him while she packed with the other. “Bring the car around to the back door,” she said. “You ain’t waiting to be fired!”
Mr. Shortley had never in his life doubted her omniscience. He perceived the entire situation in half a second and, with only a sour scowl, retreated out the door and went to drive the automobile around to the back.
They tied the two iron beds to the top of the car and the two rocking chairs inside the beds and rolled the two mattresses up between the rocking chairs. On top of this they tied a crate of chickens. They loaded the inside of the car with the old suitcases and boxes, leaving a small space for Annie Maude and Sarah Mae. It took them the rest of the afternoon and half the night to do this but Mrs. Shortley was determined that they would leave before four o’clock in the morning, that Mr. Shortley should not adjust another milking machine on this place. All the time she had been working, her face was changing rapidly from red to white and back again.
Just before dawn, as it began to drizzle rain, they were ready to leave. They all got in the car and sat there cramped up between boxes and bundles and rolls of bedding. The square black automobile moved off with more than its customary grinding noises as if it were protesting the load. In the back, the two long bony yellow-haired girls were sitting on a pile of boxes and there was a beagle hound puppy and a cat with two kittens somewhere under the blankets. The car moved slowly, like some overfreighted leaking ark, away from their shack and past the white house where Mrs. McIntyre was sleeping soundly—hardly guessing that her cows would not be milked by Mr. Shortley that morning—and past the Pole’s shack on top of the hill and on down the road to the gate where the two Negroes were walking, one behind the other, on their way to help with the milking. They looked straight at the car and its occupants but even as the dim yellow headlights lit up their faces, they politely did not seem to see anything, or anyhow, to attach significance to what was there. The loaded car might have been passing mist in the early morning half-light. They continued up the road at the same even pace without looking back.
A dark yellow sun was beginning to rise in a sky that was the same slick dark gray as the highway. The fields stretched away, stiff and weedy, on either side. “Where we goin?” Mr. Shortley asked for the first time.
Mrs. Shortley sat with one foot on a packing box so that her knee was pushed into her stomach. Mr. Shortley’s elbow was almost under her nose and Sarah Mae’s bare left foot was sticking over the front seat, touching her ear.
“Where we goin?” Mr. Shortley repeated and when she didn’t answer again, he turned and looked at her.
Fierce heat seemed to be swelling slowly and fully into her face as if it were welling up now for a final assault. She was sitting in an erect way in spite of the fact that one leg was twisted under her and one knee was almost into her neck, but there was a peculiar lack of light in her icy blue eyes. All the vision in them might have been turned around, looking inside her. She suddenly grabbed Mr. Shortley’s elbow and Sarah Mae’s foot at the same time and began to tug and pull on them as if she were trying to fit the two extra limbs onto herself.
Mr. Shortley began to curse and guickly stopped the car and Sarah Mae yelled to quit but Mrs. Shortley apparently intended to rearrange the whole car at once. She thrashed forward and backward, clutching at everything she could get her hands on and hugging it to herself, Mr. Shortley’s head, Sarah Mae’s leg, the cat, a wad of white bedding, her own big moon-like knee; then all at once her fierce expression faded into a look of astonishment and her grip on what she had loosened. One of her eyes drew near to the other and seemed to collapse quietly and she was still.
The two girls, who didn’t know what had happened to her, began to say, “Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?” They thought she was playing a joke and that their father, staring straight ahead at her, was imitating a dead man. They didn’t know that she had had a great experience or ever been displaced in the world from all that belonged to her. They were frightened by the gray slick road before them and they kept repeating in higher and higher voices, “Where we goin, Ma? Where we gain?” while their mother, her huge body rolled back still against the seat and her eyes like blue-painted glass, seemed to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country.
II
“Well,” Mrs. McIntyre said to the old Negro. “we can get along without them. We’ve seen them come and seen them go—black and white.” She was standing in the calf barn while he cleaned it and she held a rake in her hand and now and then pulled a corn cob from a corner or pointed to a soggy spot that he had missed. When she discovered the Shortleys were gone, she was delighted as it meant she wouldn’t have to fire them. The people she hired always left her—because they were that kind of people. Of all the families she had had, the Shortleys were the best if she didn’t count the Displaced Person. They had been not quite trash; Mrs. Shortley was a good woman, and she would miss her but as the Judge used to say, you couldn’t have your pie and eat it too, and she was satisfied with the D. P. “We’ve seen them come and seen them go,” she repeated with satisfaction.
“And me and you,” the old man said, stooping to drag his hoe under a feed rack, “is still here.”
She caught exactly what he meant her to catch in his tone. Bars of sunlight fell from the cracked ceiling across his back and cut him in three distinct parts. She watched his long hands clenched around the hoe and his crooked old profile pushed close to them. You might have been here before I was, she said to herself, but it’s mighty likely I’ll be here when you’re gone. “I’ve spent half my life fooling with worthless people,” she said in a severe voice, “but now I’m through.”
“Black and white,” he said, “is the same.”
“I am through,” she repeated and gave her dark smock that she had thrown over her shoulders like a cape a quick snatch at the neck. She had on a broad-brimmed black straw hat that had cost her twenty dollars twenty years ago and that she used now for a sunhat. “Money is the root of all evil,” she said. “The Judge said so every day. He said he deplored money. He said the reason you niggers were so uppity was because there was so much money in circulation.”
The old Negro had known the Judge. “Judge say he long for the day when he be too poor to pay a nigger to work,” he said. “Say when that day come, the world be back on its feet.”
She leaned forward, her hands on her hips and her neck stretched and said, “Well that day has almost come am and here and I’m telling each and everyone of you: you better look sharp. I don’t have to put up with foolishness any more. I have somebody now who has to work!”
The old man knew when to answer and when not. At length he said, “We seen them come and we seen them go.”
“However, the Shortleys were not the worst by far,” she said. “I well remember those Carrits.”
“They was before them Collinses,” he said.
“No, before the Ringfields.”
“Sweet Lord, them Ringfields!” he murmured.
“None of that kind want to work,” she said.
“We seen them come and we seen them go,” he said as if this were a refrain. “But we ain’t never had one before.” he said, bending himself up until he faced her, “like what we got now.” He was cinnamon-colored with eyes that were so blurred with age that they seemed to be hung behind cobwebs.
She gave him an intense stare and held it until, lowering his hands on the hoe, he bent down again and dragged a pile of shavings alongside the wheelbarrow. She said stiffly, “He can wash out that barn in the time it took Mr. Shortley to make up his mind he had to do it.”
“He from Pole,” the old man muttered.
“From Poland.”
“In Pole it ain’t like it is here,” he said. “They got different ways of doing,” and he began to mumble unintelligibly.
“What are you saying?” she said. “If you have anything to say about him, say it and say it aloud.”
He was silent, bending his knees precariously and edging the rake along the underside of the trough.
“If you know anything he’s done that he shouldn’t, I expect you to report it to me,” she said.
“It warn’t like it was what he should ought or oughtn’t,” he muttered. “It was like what nobody else don’t do.”
“You don’t have anything against him,” she said shortly, “and he’s here to stay.”
“We ain’t never had one like him before is all,” he murmured and gave his polite laugh.
“Times are changing,” she said. “Do you know what’s happening to this world? It’s swelling up. It’s getting so full of people that only the smart thrifty energetic ones are going to survive,” and she tapped the words, smart, thrifty, and energetic out on the palm of her hand. Through the far end of the stall she could see down the road to where the Displaced Person was standing in the open barn door with the green hose in his hand. There was a certain stiffness about his figure that seemed to make it necessary for her to approach him slowly, even in her thoughts. She had decided this was because she couldn’t hold an easy conversation with him. Whenever she said anything to him, she found herself shouting and nodding extravagantly and she would be conscious that one of the Negroes was leaning behind the nearest shed, watching.
“No indeed!” she said, sitting down on one of the feed racks and folding her arms, “I’ve made up my mind that I’ve had enough trashy people on this place to last me a lifetime and I’m not going to spend my last years fooling with Shortleys and Ringfields and Collins when the world is full of people who have to work.”
“Howcome they so many extra?” he asked.
“People are selfish,” she said. “They have too many children. There’s no sense in it any more.”
He had picked up the wheelbarrow handles and was backing out the door and he paused, half in the sunlight and half out, and stood there chewing his gums as if he had forgotten which direction he wanted to move in.
“What you colored people don’t realize,” she said, “is that I’m the one around here who holds all the strings together. If you don’t work, I don’t make any money and I can’t pay you. You’re all dependent on me but you each and everyone act like the shoe is on the other foot.”
It was not possible to tell from his face if he heard her. Finally he backed out with the wheelbarrow. “Judge say the devil he know is better than the devil he don’t,” he said in a clear mutter and trundled off.
She got up and followed him, a deep vertical pit appearing suddenly in the center of her forehead, just under the red bangs. “The Judge has long since ceased to pay the bills around here,” she called in a piercing voice.
He was the only one of her Negroes who had known the Judge and he thought this gave him title. He had had a low opinion of Mr. Crooms and Mr. McIntyre, her other husbands, and in his veiled polite way, he had congratulated her after each of her divorces. When he thought it necessary, he would work under a window where he knew she was sitting and talk to himself, a careful roundabout discussion, question and answer and then refrain. Once she had got up silently and slammed the window down so hard that he had fallen backwards off his feet. Or occasionally he spoke with the peacock. The cock would follow him around the place, his steady eye on the ear of corn that stuck up from the old man’s back pocket or he would sit near him and pick himself. Once from the open kitchen door, she had heard him say to the bird, “I remember when it was twenty of you walking about this place and now it’s only you and two hens. Crooms it was twelve. McIntyre it was five. You and two hens now.”
And that time she had stepped out of the door onto the porch and said, “MISTER Crooms and MISTER McIntyre! And I don’t want to hear you call either of them anything else again. And you can understand this: when that peachicken dies there won’t be any replacements.”
She kept the peacock only out of a superstitious fear of annoying the Judge in his grave. He had liked to see them walking around the place for he said they made him feel rich. Of her three husbands, the Judge was the one most present to her although he was the only one she had buried. He was in the family graveyard, a little space fenced in the middle of the back cornfield, with his mother and father and grandfather and three great aunts and two infant cousins. Mr. Crooms, her second, was forty miles away in the state asylum and Mr. McIntyre, her last, was intoxicated, she supposed, in some hotel room in Florida. But the Judge, sunk in the cornfield with his family, was always at home.
She had married him when he was an old man and because of his money but there had been another reason that she would not admit then, even to herself: she had liked him. He was a dirty snuff-dipping Court House figure, famous all over the county for being rich, who wore hightop shoes, a string tie, a gray suit with a black stripe in it, and a yellowed panama hat, winter and summer. His teeth and hair were tobacco-colored ang his face a clay pink pitted and tracked with mysterious prehistoric-looking marks as if he had been unearthed among fossils. There had been a peculiar odor about him of sweaty fondled bills but he never carried money on him or had a nickel to show. She was his secretary for a few months and the old man with his sharp eye had seen at once that here was a woman who admired him for himself. The three years that he lived after they married were the happiest and most prosperous of Mrs. McIntyre’s life, but when he died his estate proved to be bankrupt. He left her a mortgaged house and fifty acres that he had managed to cut the timber off before he died. It was as if, as the final triumph of a successful life, he had been able to take everything with him.
But she had survived. She had survived a succession of tenant farmers and dairymen that the old man himself would have found hard to outdo, and she had been able to meet the constant drain of a tribe of moody unpredictable Negroes, and she had even managed to hold her own against the incidental blood suckers, the cattle dealers and lumber men and the buyers and sellers of anything who drove up in pieced-together trucks and honked in the yard.
She stood slightly reared back with her arms folded under her smock and a satisfied expression on her face as she watched the Displaced Person turn off the hose and disappear inside the barn. She was sorry that the poor man had been chased out of Poland and run across Europe and had had to take up in a tenant shack in a strange country, but she had not been responsible for any of this. She had had a hard time herself. She knew what it was to struggle. People ought to have to struggle. Mr. Guizac had probably had everything given to him all the way across Europe and over here. He had probably not had to struggle enough. She had given him a job. She didn’t know if he was grateful or not. She didn’t know anything about him except that he did the work. The truth was that he was not very real to her yet. He was a kind of miracle that she had seen happen and that she talked about but that she still didn’t believe.
She watched as he came out at the barn and motioned to Sulk. who was coming around the back of the lot. He gesticulated and then took something out of his pocket and the two of them stood looking at it. She started down the lane toward them. The Negro’s figure was slack and tall and he was craning his rolling head forward in his usual idiotic way. He was a little better than half-witted but when they were like that they were always good workers. The Judge had said always hire you a half-witted nigger because they don’t have sense enough to stop working. The Pole was gesticulating rapidly. He left something with the colored boy and then walked off and before she rounded the turn in the lane, she heard the tractor crank up. He was on his way to the field. The Negro was still hanging there, gaping at whatever he had in his hand.
She entered the lot and walked through the barn, looking with approval at the wet spotless concrete floor. It was only nine-thirty and Mr. Shortley had never got anything washed until eleven. As she came out at the other end, she saw the Negro moving very slowly in a diagonal path across the road in front of her, his eyes still on what Mr. Guizac had given him. He didn’t see her and he paused and dipped his knees and leaned over his hand, his tongue describing little circles. He had a photograph. He lifted one finger and traced it lightly over the surface of the picture. Then he looked up and saw her and seemed to freeze, his mouth in a halfgrin, his finger lifted.
“Why haven’t you gone to the field?” she asked.
He raised one foot and opened his mouth wider while the hand with the photograph edged toward his back pocket.
“What’s that?” she said.
“It ain’t nothing,” he muttered and handed it to her automatically.
It was a photograph of a girl of about twelve in a white dress. She had blond hair with a wreath in it and she looked forward out of light eyes that were bland and composed. “Who is this child?” Mrs. McIntyre asked.
“She his cousin,” the boy said in a high voice.
“Well what are you doing with it?” she asked.
“She going to mah me,” he said in an even higher voice.
“Marry you!” she shrieked.
“I pays half to get her over here,” he said. “I pays him three dollar a week. She bigger now. She his cousin. She don’t care who she mah she so glad to get away from there.” The high voice seemed to shoot up like a nervous jet of sound and then fall flat as he watched her face. Her eyes were the color of blue granite when the glare falls on it, but she was not looking at him. She was looking down the road where the distant sound of the tractor could be heard.
“I don’t reckon she gain to come nohow.” the boy murmured.
“I’ll see that you get every cent of your money back,” she said in a toneless voice and turned and walked off, holding the photograph bent in two. There was nothing about her small stiff figure to indicate that she was shaken.
As soon as she got in the house, she lay down on her bed and shut her eyes and pressed her hand over her heart as if she were trying to keep it in place. Her mouth opened and she made two or three dry little sounds. Then after a minute she sat up and said aloud, “They’re all the same. It’s always been like this,” and she fell back flat again. “Twenty years of being beaten and done in and they even robbed his grave!” and remembering that, she began to cry quietly, wiping her eyes every now and then with the hem of her smock.
What she had thought of was the angel over the Judge’s grave. This had been a naked granite cherub that the old man had seen in the city one day in a tombstone store window. He had been taken with it at once, partly because its face reminded him of his wife and partly because he wanted a genuine work of art over his grave. He had come home with it sitting on the green plush train seat beside him. Mrs. Mclntyre had never noticed the resemblance to herself. She had always thought it hideous but when the Herrins stole it off the old man’s grave, she w. is shocked and outraged. Mrs. Herrin had thought it very pretty and had walked to the graveyard frequently to see it, and when the Herrins left the angel left with them, all but its toes, for the ax old man Herrin had used to break it off with had struck slightly too high. Mrs. Mclntyre had never been able to afford to have it replaced.
When she had cried all she could, she got up and went into the back hall, a closet-like space that was dark and quiet as a chapel and sat down on the edge of the Judge’s black mechanical chair with her elbow on his desk. This was a giant roll-top piece of furniture pocked with pigeon holes full of dusty papers. Old bankbooks and ledgers were stacked in the halfopen drawers and there was a small safe, empty but locked, set like a tabernacle in the center of it. She had left this part of the house unchanged since the old man’s time. It was a kind of memorial to him, sacred because he had conducted his business here. With the slightest tilt one way or the other, the chair gave a rusty skeletal groan that sounded something like him when he had complained of his poverty. It had been his first principle to talk as if he were the poorest man in the world and she followed it, not only because he had but because it was true. When she sat with her intense constricted face turned toward the empty safe, she knew there was nobody poorer in the world than she was.
She sat motionless at the desk for ten or fifteen minutes and then as if she had gained some strength, she got up and got in her car and drove to the cornfield.
The road ran through a shadowy pine thicket and ended on top of a hill that rolled fan-wise down and up again in a broad expanse of tassled green. Mr. Guizac was cutting from the outside of the field in a circular path to the center where the graveyard was all but hidden by the corn, and she could see him on the high far side of the slope, mounted on the tractor with the cutter and wagon behind him. From time to time, he had to get off the tractor and climb in the wagon to spread the silage because the Negro had not arrived. She watched impatiently, standing in front of her black coupe with her arms folded under her smock, while he progressed slowly around the rim of the field, gradually getting close enough for her to wave to him to get down. He stopped the machine and jumped off and came running forward, wiping his red jaw with a piece of grease rag.
“I want to talk to you,” she said and beckoned him to the edge of the thicket where it was shady. He took off the cap and followed her, smiling, but his smile faded when she turned and faced him. Her eyebrows, thin and fierce as a spider’s leg, had drawn together ominously and the deep vertical pit had plunged down from under the red bangs into the bridge of her nose. She removed the bent picture from her pocket and handed it to him silently. Then she stepped back and said, “Mr. Guizac! You would bring this poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!”
He took the photograph with a slowly returning smile. “My cousin,” he said. “She twelve here. First Communion. Six-ten now.”
Monster! she said to herself and looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. His forehead and skull were white where they had been protected by his cap but the rest of his face was red and bristled with short yellow hairs, his eyes were like two bright nails behind his gold-rimmed spectacles that had been mended over the nose with haywire. His whole: face looked as if it might have been patched together out of several others. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, beginning slowly and then speaking faster until she ended breathless in the middle of a word, “that nigger cannot have a white wife from Europe. You can’t talk to a nigger that way. You’ll excite him and besides it can’t be done. Maybe it can be done in Poland but it can’t be done here and you’ll have to stop. It’s all foolishness. That nigger don’t have a grain of sense and you’ll excite…”
“She in camp three year,” he said.
“Your cousin,” she said in a positive voice, “cannot come over here and marry one of my Negroes.”
“She six-ten year,” he said. “From Poland. Mamma die, pappa die. She wait in camp. Three camp.” He pulled a wallet from his pocket and fingered through it and took out another picture of the same girl, a few years older, dressed in something dark and shapeless. She was standing against a wall with a short wornan who apparently had no teeth. “She mamma,” he said, pointing to the woman. “She die in two camp.”
“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre said, pushing the picture back at him, “I will not have my niggers upset. I cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you but not without them and if you mention this girl to Sulk again, you won’t have a job with me. Do you understand?”
His face showed no comprehension. He seemed to be piecing all these words together in his mind to make a thought.
Mrs. McIntyre remembered Mrs. Shortlev’c words: “He understands everything, he only pretends he don’t so as to do exactly as he pleases,” and her face regained the look of shocked wrath she had begun with. “I cannot understand how a min who calls himself a Christian,” she said, “could bring a poor innocent girl over here and marry her to something like that. I cannot understand it. I cannot!” and she shook her head and looked into the distance with a pained blue gaze.
After a second he shrugged and let his arms drop as if he were tired. “She no care black,” he said. “She in camp three year.”
Mrs. McIntyre felt a peculiar weakness behind her knees. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, “I don’t want to have to speak ‘you about this again. If I do, you’ll have to find another place yourself. Do you understand?”
The patched face did not say. She had the impression that he didn’t see her there. “This is my place,” she said. “I say who will come here and who won’t.”
“Ya,” he said and put back all his cap.
“I am not responsible for the world’s misery,’ she said as an afterthought.
“Ya,” he said.
“You have a good job. You should be grateful to be here,” she added, “but I’m not sure you are.”
“Ya,” he said and gave his little shrug and turned back to the tractor.
She watched him get on and maneuver the machine into the corn again. When he had passed her and rounded the turn, she climbed to the top of the slope and stood with her arms folded and looked out grimly over the field. “They’re all the same,” she muttered, “whether they come from Poland or Tennessee. I’ve handled Herrins and Ringfields and Shortleys and I can handle a Guizac,” and she narrowed her gaze until it closed entirely around the diminishing figure on the tractor as if she were watching him through a gunsight. All her life she had been fighting the world’s overflow and now she had it in the form of a Pole. “You’re just like all the rest of them,” she said,”—only smart and thrifty and energetic but so am I. And this is my place,” and she stood there, a small black-hatted, black-smocked figure with an aging cherubic face, and folded her arms as if she were equal to anything. But her heart was beating as if some interior violence had already been done to her. She opened her eyes to include the whole field so that the figure on the tractor was no larger than a grasshopper in her widened view.
She stood there for some time. There was a slight breeze and the corn trembled in great waves on both sides of the slope. The big cutter, with its monotonous roar, continued to shoot it pulverized into the wagon in a steady spurt of fodder. By nightfall, the Displaced Person would have worked his way around and around until there would be nothing on either side of the two hills but the stubble, and down in the center, risen like a little island, the graveyard where the Judge lay grinning under his desecrated monument.
III
The priest, with his long bland face supported on one finger, had been talking for ten minutes about Purgatory while Mrs. McIntyre squinted furiously at him from an opposite chair. They were drinking ginger ale on her front porch and she kept rattling the ice in her glass, rattling her beads, rattling her bracelet like an impatient pony jingling its harness. There is no moral obligation to keep him, she was saying under her breath. there is absolutely no moral obligation. Suddenly she lurched up and her voice fell across his brogue like a drill into a mechanical saw. “Listen,” she said, “I’m not theological. I’m practical! I want to talk to you about something practical!”
“Arrrrrrr,” he groaned, grating to a halt.
She had put at least a finger of whiskey in her own ginger ale so that she would be able to endure his full-length visit and she sat down awkwardly, finding the chair closer to her than she had expected. “Mr. Guizac is not satisfactory,” she said.
The old man raised his eyebrows in mock wonder.
“He’s extra,” she said, “He doesn’t fit in. I have to have somebody who fits in.”
The priest carefully turned his hat on his knees. He had a little trick of waiting a second silently and then swinging the conversation back into his own paths. He was about eighty. She had never known a priest until she had gone to see this one on the business of getting her the Displaced Person. After he had got her the Pole, he had used the business introduction to try to convert her—just as she had supposed he would.
“Give him time,” the old man said. “He’ll learn to fit in. Where is that beautiful birrrrd of yours?” he asked and then said, “Arrrrr, I see him!” and stood up and looked out over the lawn where the peacock and the two hens were stepping at a strained attention, their long necks ruffled, the cock’s violent blue and the hens’ silvergreen, glinting in the late afternoon sun.
“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. Mclntyre continued, bearing down with a flat steady voice, “is very efficient. “I’ll admit that. But he doesn’t understand how to get on with my niggers and they don’t like him. I can’t have my niggers run off. And I don’t like his attitude. He’s not the least grateful for being here.”
The priest had his hand on the screen door and he opened it, ready to make his escape. “Arrrr, I must be off,” he murmured.
“I tell you if I had a white man who understood the Negroes, I’d have to let Mr. Guizac go,” she said and stood up again.
He turned then and looked her in the face. “He has nowhere to go,” he said. Then he said, “Dear lady, I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t turn him out for a trifle!”’ and without waiting for an answer, he raised his hand and gave her his blessing in a rumbling voice.
She smiled angrily and said, “I didn’t create this situation, of course.”
The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread t with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a greengold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.
Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical, expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. “It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go,” she said. “I don’t find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world.”
The old man didn’t seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. “The Transfiguration,” he murmured.
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Guizac didn’t have to come here in the first place,” she said giving him a hard look.
The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.
“He didn’t have to come in the first place,” she repeated, emphasizing each word.
The old man smiled absently. “He came to redeem us,” he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.
If Mr. Shortley had not returned a few weeks later, she would have gone out looking for a new man to hire. She had not wanted him back but when she saw the familiar black automobile drive up the road and stop by the sick of the house, she had the feeling that she was the one returning, after a long miserable trip to her own place. She realized all at once that it was Mrs, Shortley she had been missing. She had had no one to talk to since Mrs Shortley left, and she ran to the door, expecting to see her heaving herself up the steps.
Mr. Shortley stood there alone. He had on a black felt hat and a shirt with red and blue palm trees designed in it but the hollows in his long bitten blistered face were deeper than they had been a month ago.
“Well!” she said. “Where is Mrs. Shortley?”
Mr. Shortley didn’t say anything. The change in his face seemed to have come from the inside; he looked like a man who had gone for a long time without water. “She was God’s own angel,” he said in a loud voice. “She was the sweetest woman in the world.”
“Where is she?” Mrs. McIntyre murmured.
“Daid,” he said. “She had herself a stroke on the day she left out of here.” There was a corpse-like composure about his face. “I figure that Pole killed her,” he said. “She seen through him from the first. She known he come from the devil. She told me so.”
It took Mrs. McIntyre three days to get over Mrs. Shortley’s death. She told herself that anyone would have thought they were kin. She rehired Mr. Shortley to do farm work though actually she didn’t want him without his wife. She told him she was going to give thirty days’ notice to the Displaced Person at the end of the month and that then he could have his job hack in the dairy. Mr. Shortley preferred the dairy job but he was willing to wait. He said it would give him some satisfaction to see the Pole leave the place, and Mrs. McIntyre said it would give her a great deal of satisfaction. She confessed that she should have been content with the help she had in the first place and not have been reaching into other parts of the world for it. Mr. Shortley said he never had cared for foreigners since he had been in the first world’s war and seen what they were like. He said he had seen all kinds then but that none of them were like us. He said he recalled the face of one man who had thrown a hand-grenade at him and that the man had had little round eyeglasses exactly like Mr. Guizac’s.
“But Mr. Guizac is a Pole, he’s not a German,” Mrs. McIntyre said.
“It ain’t a great deal of difference in them two kinds,” Mr. Shortley had explained.
The Negroes were pleased to see Mr. Shortley back. The Displaced Person had expected them to work as hard as he worked himself, whereas Mr. Shortlev recognized their limitations. He had never been a very good worker himself with Mrs. Shanley to keep him in line, but without her, he was even more forgetful and slow. The Pole worked as fiercely as ever and seemed to have no inkling that he was about to be fired. Mrs. McIntyre saw jobs done in a short time that she had thought would never get done at all. Still she was resolved to get rid of him. The sight of his small stiff figure moving quickly here and there had come to be the most irritating sight on the place for her, and she felt she had been tricked by the old priest. He had said there was no legal obligation for her to keep the Displaced Person if he was not satisfactory, but then he had brought up the moral one.
She meant to tell him that her moral obligation was to her own people, to Mr. Shortley, who had fought in the world war for his country and not to Mr. Guizac who had merely arrived here to take advantage of whatever he could. She felt she must have this out with the priest before she fired the Displaced Person. When the first of the month came and the priest hadn’t called, she put off giving the Pole notice for a little longer.
Mr. Shortley told himself that he should have known all along that no woman was going to do what she said she was when she said she was. He didn’t know how long he could afford to put up with her shilly-shallying. He thought himself that she was going soft and was afraid to turn the Pole out for fear he would have a hard time getting another place. He could tell her the truth about this: that if she let him go, in three years he would own his own house and have a television aerial sitting on top of it. As a matter of policy, Mr. Shortley began to come to her back door every evening to put certain facts before her. “A white man sometimes don’t get the consideration a nigger gets,” he said, “but that don’t matter because he’s still white, but sometimes,” and here he would pause and look off into the distance, “a man that’s fought and bled and died in the service of his native land don’t get the consideration of one of them like them he was fighting. I ast you: is that right?” When he asked her such questions he could watch her face and tell he was making an impression. She didn’t look too well these days. He noticed lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there when he and Mrs. Shortley had been the only white help on the place. Whenever he thought of Mrs. Shortley, he felt his heart go down like an old bucket into a dry well.
The old priest kept away as if he had been frightened by his last visit but finally, seeing that the Displaced Person had not been fired, he ventured to call again to take up giving Mrs. McIntyre instructions where he remembered leaving them off. She had not asked to be instructed but he instructed anyway, forcing a little definition of one of the sacraments or of some dogma into each conversation he had, no matter with whom. He sat on her porch, taking no notice of her partly mocking, partly outraged expression as she sat shaking her foot, waiting for an opportunity to drive a wedge into his talk. “For,” he was saying, as if he spoke of something that had happened yesterday in town, “when God sent his Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord”—he slightly bowed his head—”as a Redeemer to mankind, He…”
“Father Flynn!” she said in a voice that made him jump. “I want to talk to you about something serious!”
The skin under the old man’s right eye flinched.
“As far as I’m concerned,” she said and glared at him fiercely, “Christ was just another D. P.”
He raised his hands slightly and let them drop on his knees.
“Arrrrrr,” he murmured as if he were considering this.
“I’m going to let that man go,” she said. “I don’t have any obligation to him. My obligation is to the people who’ve done something for their country, not to the ones who’ve just come over to take advantage of what they can get,” and she began to talk rapidly, remembering all her arguments. The priest’s attention seemed to retire to some private oratory to wait until she got through. Once or twice his gaze roved out onto the lawn as if he were hunting some means of escape but she didn’t stop. She told him how she had been hanging onto this place for thirty years, always just barely making it against people who came from nowhere and were going nowhere, who didn’t want anything but an automobile. She said she had found out they were the same whether they came from Poland or Tennessee. When the Guizacs got ready, she said, they would not hesitate to leave her. She told him how the people who looked rich were the poorest of all because they had the most to keep up. She asked him how he thought she paid her feed bills. She told him she would like to have her house done over but she couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t even afford to have the monument restored over her husband’s grave. She asked him if he would like to guess what her insurance amounted to for the year. Finally she asked him if he thought she was made of money and the old man suddenly let out a great ugly bellow as if this were a comical question.
When the visit was over, she felt let down, though she had clearly triumphed over him. She made up her mind now that on the first of the month, she would give the Displaced Person his thirty days’ notice and she told Mr. Shortley so.
Mr. Shortley didn’t say anything. His wife had been the only woman he was ever acquainted with who was never scared off from doing what she said. She said the Pole had been sent by the devil and the priest. Mr. Shortley had no doubt that the priest had got some peculiar control over Mrs. McIntyre and that before long she would start attending his Masses. She looked as if something was wearing her down from the inside. She was thinner and more fidgety, and not as sharp as she used to be. She would look at a milk can now and not see how dirty it was and he had seen her lips move when she was not talking. The Pole never did anything the wrong way but all the same he was very irritating to her. Mr. Shortley himself did things as he pleased—not always her way—but she didn’t seem to notice. She had noticed though that the Pole and all his family were getting fat; she pointed out to, Mr. Shortley that the hollows had come out of their cheeks and that they saved every cent they made. “Yes’m, and one of these days he’ll be able to buy and sell you out,” Mr. Shortley had ventured to say, and he could tell that the statement had shaken her.
“I’m just waiting for the first,” she had said.
Mr. ShortIey waited too and the first came and went and she didn’t fire him. He could have told anybody how it would be. He was not a violent man but he hated to see a woman done in by a foreigner. He felt that that was one thing a man couldn’t stand by and see happen.
There was no reason Mrs. McIntyre should not fire Mr. Guizac at once but she put it off from day to day. She wad worried about her bills and about her health. She didn’t sleep at night or when she did she dreamed about the Displaced Person. She hid never discharged anyone before; they had all left her. One nigh: she dreamed that Mr. Guizac and his family were moving into her house and that she was moving in with Mr. Shortley. This was tau much for her and she woke up and didn’t sleep again for several nights; and one night she dreamed that the priest came to call and droned on and on saying, “Dear lady, I know your tender heart won’t suffer you to turn the porrrrr man out. Think of the thousands of them, think of the ovens and the boxcars and the camps and the sick children and Christ Our Lord.”
“He’s extra and he’s upset the balance around here,” she said, “and I’m a logical practical woman and there are no ovens here and no camps and no Christ Our Lord and when he leaves, he’ll make more money. He’ll work at the mill and buy a car and don’t talk to me—all they want is a car.”
“The ovens and the boxcars and the sick children,” droned the priest, “and our dear Lord.”
“Just one too many,” she said.
The next morning, she made up her mind while she was eating her breakfast that she would give him his notice at once, and she stood up and walked out of the kitchen and down the load with her table napkin still in her hand. Mr. Guizac was spraying, the barn, standing in his swaybacked way with one hand on his hip. He turned off the hose and gave her an impatient kind of attention as if she were interfering with his work. She had not thought of what she would say to him, she had merely come. She stood in the barn door, looking severely at the wet spotless floor and the dripping stanchions. “Ya goot?” he said.
“Mr. Guizac,” she said, “I can barely meet my obligations now.” Then she said in a louder, stronger voice, emphasizing each word, “I have bills to pay.”
“I too,” Mr. Guizac said. “Much bills, little money,” and he shrugged.
At the other end of the barn, she saw a long beak-nosed shadow glide like a snake halfway up the sunlit open door and stop; and somewhere behind her, she was aware of a silence where the sound of the Negroes shoveling had come a minute before. “This is my place,” she said angrily. “All of you are extra. Each and everyone of you are extra!”
“Ya,” Mr. Guizac said and turned on the hose again.
She wiped her mouth with the napkin she had in her hand and walked off, as if she had accomplished what she came for.
Mr. Shortley’s shadow withdrew from the door and he leaned against the side of the barn and lit half of a cigarette that he took out of his pocket. There was nothing for him to do now but wait on the hand of God to strike, but he knew one thing: he was not going to wait with his mouth shut.
Starting that morning, he began to complain and to state his side of the case to every person he saw, black or white. He complained in the grocery store and at the courthouse and on the street corner and directly to Mrs. Mcintyre herself, for there was nothing underhanded about him. If the Pole could have understood what he had to say, he would have said it to him too. “All men was created free and equal,” he said to Mrs. McIntyre, “and I risked my life and limb to prove it. Gone over there and fought and bled and died and come back on over here and find out who’s got my job—just exactly who I been fighting. It was a hand-grenade come that near to killing me and I seen who throwed it—little man with eyeglasses just like his. Might have bought them at the same store. Small world,” and he gave a bitter little laugh. Since he didn’t have Mrs. Shortley to do the talking any more, he had started doing it himself and had found that he had a gift for it. He had the power of making other people see his logic. He talked a good deal to the Negroes.
“Whyn’t you go back to Africa?” he asked Sulk one morning as they were cleaning out the silo. “That’s your country, ain’t it?”
“I ain’t gain there,” the boy said. “They might eat me up.”
“Well, if you behave yourself it isn’t any reason you can’t stay here,” Mr. Shortley said kindly. “Because you didn’t run away from nowhere Your granddaddy was bought. He didn’t have a thing to do with coming. It’s the people that run away from where they come from that I ain’t got any use for.”
“I never felt no need to travel,” the Negro said.
“Well,” Mr. Shortley said, “if I was going to travel again, it would be to either China or Africa. You go to either of them two places and you can tell right away what the difference is between you and them. You go to these other places and the only way you can tell is if they say something. And then you can’t always tell because about half of them know the English language. That’s where we make our mistake,” he said,“—letting all them people onto English. There’d be a heap less trouble if everybody only knew his own language. My wife said knowing two languages was like having eyes in the back of your head. You couldn’t put nothing over on her.”
“You sho couldn’t,” the boy muttered, and then he added, “She was fine. She was sho fine. I never known a finer white woman than her.”
Mr. Shortley turned in the opposite direction and worked silently for a while. After a few minutes he leaned up and tapped the colored boy onn the shoulder with the handle of his shovel. For a second he only looked at him while a great deal of meaning gathered in his wet eyes. Then he said softly, “Revenge is mine, saith the Lord.”
Mrs. McIntyre found that everybody in town knew Mr. Shortley’s version of her business and that everyone was critical of her conduct. She began to understand that she had a moral obligation to fire the Pole and that she was shirking it because she found it hard to do. She could not stand the increasing guilt any longer and on a cold Saturday morning, she started off after breakfast to fire him. She walked down to the machine shed where she heard him cranking up the tractor.
There was a heavy frost on the ground that made the fields look like the rough backs of sheep; the sun was almost silver and the woods stuck up like dry bristles on the sky line. The countryside seemed to be receding from the little circle of noise around the shed. Mr. Guizac was squatting on the ground beside the small tractor, putting in a part. Mrs. Mcintyre hoped to get the fields turned over while he still had thirty days to work (Or her. The colored boy was standing by with some tools in his hand and Mr. Shortley was under the shed about to get up or the large tractor and back it out. She meant to wait until he and the Negro got out of the way before she began her unpleasant duty.
She stood watching Mr. Guizac, stamping her feet on the hard ground, for the cold was climbing like a paralysis up her feet and legs. She had on a heavy black coat and a red head-kerchief with her black hat pulled down on top of it to keep the glare out of her eyes. Under the black brim her face had an abstracted look and once or twice her lips moved silently. Mr. Guizac shouted over the noise of the tractor for the Negro to hand him a screwdriver and when he got it, he turned over on his back on the icy ground and reached up under the machine. She could not see his face, only his feet and legs and trunk sticking impudently out from the side of the tractor. He had on rubber boots that were cracked and splashed with mud. He raised one knee and then lowered it and turned himself slightly. Of all the things she resented about him, she resented most that he hadn’t left on his own accord.
Mr. Shortley had got on the large tractor and was backing it out from under the shed. He seemed to be warmed by it as if its heat and strength sent impulses up through him that he obeyed instantly. He had headed it toward the small tractor but he braked it on a slight incline and jumped off and turned back toward the shed. Mrs. Mcintyre was looking fixedly at Mr. Guizac’s legs lying flat on the ground now. She heard the brake on the large tractor slip and, looking up, she saw it move forward, calculating its own path. Later she remembered that she had seen the Negro jump silently out of the way as if a spring in the earth had released him and that she had seen Mr. Shortley turn his head with incredible slowness and stare silently over his shoulder and that she had started to shout to the Displaced Person but that she had not. She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and the Negro’s eyes come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever, and she had heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone. The two men ran forward to help and she fainted.
She remembered, when she came to, running somewhere, perhaps into the house and out again but she could not remember what for or if she had fainted again when she got there. When she finally came back to where the tractors were, the ambulance had arrived. Mr. Guizac’s body was covered with the bent bodies of his wife and two children and by a black one which hung over him, murmuring words she didn’t understand. At first she thought this must be the doctor but then with a feeling of annoyance she recognized the priest, who had come with the ambulance and was slipping something into the crushed man’s mouth. After a minute he stood up and she looked first at his bloody pants legs and then at his face which was not averted from her but was as withdrawn and expressionless as the rest of the countryside. She only stared at him for she was too shocked by her experience to be quite herself. Her mind was not taking hold of all that was happening. She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance.
That evening, Mr. Shortley left without notice to look for a new position and the Negro, Sulk, was taken with a sudden desire to see more of the world and set off for the southern part of the state.
The old man Astor could not work without company. Mrs. McIntyre hardly noticed that she had no help left for she came down with a nervous affliction and had to go to the hospital. When she came back, she saw that the place would be too much for her to run now and she turned her cows over to a professional auctioneer (who sold them at a loss) and retired to live on what she had, while she tried to save her declining health. A numbness developed in one of her legs and her hands and head began to jiggle and eventually she had to stay in bed all the time with only a colored woman to wait on her. Her eyesight grew steadily worse and she lost her voice altogether. Not many people remembered to come out to the country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.
A Temple of the Holy Ghost (1954)
ALL weekend the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Two, shaking with laughter and getting so red and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway. They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses. They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs. None of their ways were lost on the child. If only one of them had come, that one would have played with her, but since there were two of them, she was out of it and watched them suspiciously from a distance.
They were fourteen—two years older than she was—but neither of them was bright, which was why they had been sent to the convent. If they had gone to a regular school, they wouldn’t have done anything but think about boys; at the convent the sisters, her mother said, would keep a grip on their necks. The child decided, after observing them for a few hours, that they were practically morons and she was glad to think that they were only second cousins and she couldn’t have inherited any of their stupidity. Susan called herself Suzan. She was very skinny but she had a pretty pointed face and red hair. Joanne had yellow hair that was naturally curly but she talked through her nose and when she laughed, she turned purple in patches. Neither one of them could say an intelligent thing and all their sentences began, “You know this boy I know well one time he…”
They were to stay all weekend and her mother said she didn’t see how she would entertain them since she didn’t know any boys their age. At this, the child, struck suddenly with genius, shouted, “There’s Cheat! Get Cheat to come! Ask Miss Kirby to get Cheat to come show them around!” and she nearly choked on the food she had in her mouth. She doubled over laughing and hit the table with her fist and looked at the two bewildered girls while water started in her eyes and rolled down her fat cheeks and the braces she had in her mouth glared like tin. She had never thought of anything so funny before.
Her mother laughed in a guarded way and Miss Kirby blushed and carried her fork delicately to her mouth with one pea on it. She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher who boarded with them and Mr. Cheatam was her admirer, a rich old farmer who arrived every Saturday afternoon in a fifteen-year-old baby-blue Pontiac powdered with red clay dust and black inside with Negroes that he charged ten cents apiece to bring into town on Saturday afternoons. After he dumped them he came to see Miss Kirby, always bringing a little gift—a bag of boiled peanuts or a watermelon or a stalk of sugar cane and once a wholesale box of Baby Ruth candy bars. He was baldheaded except for a little fringe of rustcolored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gulleys. He wore a pale green shirt with a thin black stripe in it and blue galluses and his trousers cut across a protruding stomach that he pressed tenderly from time to time with his big flat thumb. All his teeth were backed with gold and he would roll his eyes at Miss Kirby in an impish way and say, “Haw haw,” sitting in their porch swing with his legs spread apart and his hightopped shoes pointing in opposite directions on the floor.
“I don’t think Cheat is going to be in town this weekend,” Miss Kirby said, not in the least understanding that this was a joke, and the child was convulsed afresh, threw herself backward in her chair, fell out of it, rolled on the floor and lay there heaving. Her mother told her if she didn’t stop this foolishness she would have to leave the table.
Yesterday her mother had arranged with Alonzo Myers to drive them the forty-five miles to Mayville, where the convent was, to get the girls for the weekend and Sunday afternoon he was hired to drive them back again. He was an eighteen-year-old boy who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and worked for the taxi company and he was all you could get to drive you anywhere. He smoked or rather chewed a short black cigar and he had a round sweaty chest that showed through the yellow nylon shirt he wore. When he drove all the windows of the car had to be open.
“Well there’s Alonzo!” the child roared from the Roar. “Get Alonzo to show em around! Get Alonzo!”
The two girls, who had seen Alonzo, began to scream their indignation.
Her mother thought this was funny too but she said, “That’ll be about enough out of you,” and changed the subject. She asked them why they called each other Temple One and Temple Two and this sent them off into gales of giggles. Finally they managed to explain. Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what to do if a young man Should—here they laughed so hard they were not able to go on without going back to the beginning—on what to do if a young man should—they put their heads in their laps—on what to do if—they finally managed to shout it out—if he should “behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile.” Sister Perpetua said they were to say, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” and that would put an end to it. The child sat up off the floor with a blank face. She didn’t see anything so funny in this. What was really funny was the idea of Mr. Cheatam or Alonzo Myers beauing them around. That killed her.
Her mother didn’t laugh at what they had said. “I think you girls are pretty silly,” she said. “After all, that’s what you are—Temples of the Holy Ghost.”
The two of them looked up at her, politely concealing their giggles, but with astonished faces as if they were beginning to realize that she was made of the same stuff as Sister Perpetua,
Miss Kirby preserved her set expression and the child thought, it’s all over her head anyhow. I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.
After dinner, her mother collapsed on the bed and said, “Those girls are going to drive me crazy if I don’t get some entertainment for them. They’re awful.”
“I bet I know who you could get,” the child started.
“Now listen. I don’t want to hear any more about Mr. Cheatam,” her mother said. “You embarrass Miss Kirby. He’s her only friend.
Oh my Lord,” and she sat up and looked mournfully out the window, “that poor soul is so lonesome she’ll even ride in that car that smells like the last circle in hell.”
And she’s a Temple of the Holy Ghost too, the child reflected. “I wasn’t thinking of him,” she said. “I was thinking of those two Wilkinses, Wendell and Cory, that visit old lady Buchcll out on her farm. They’re her grandsons. They work for her.”
“Now that’s an idea,” her mother murmured and gave her an appreciative look. But then she slumped again. “They’re only farm boys. These girls would turn up their noses at them.’
“Huh,” the child said. “They wear pants. They’re sixteen and they got a car. Somebody said they were both going to be Church of God preachers because you don’t have to know nothing to be one.”
“They would be perfectly safe with those boys allright,” her mother said and in a minute she got up and called their grandmother on the telephone and after she had talked t< the old woman a half an hour, it was arranged that Wendell and Cory would come to supper and afterwards take the girls to the fair.
Susan and Joanne were so pleased that they washed their hair and rolled it up on aluminum curlers. Hah, thought, he child, sitting crosslegged on the bed to watch them undo the curlers, wait’ll you get a load of Wendell and Cory! “You’ll like these boys.” she said. “Wendell is six feet tall and got red hair. Cory is six feet six inches tails got black hair and wears a sport jacket and they gottem this car with a squirrel tail on the front.”
“How does a child like you know so much; about these men?” Susan asked and pushed her face up close to the mirror to watch the pupils in her eyes dilate.
The child lay back on the bed and began to count the narrow boards in the ceiling until she lost her place. I know them all right, she said to someone. We fought in the world war together.
They were under me and I saved them five times from Japanese suicide divers and Wendell said I am going to marry that kid and the other said oh no you ain’t I am and I said neither one of you is because I will court marshall you all before you can bat an eye. “I’ve seen them around is all,” she said.
When they came the girls stared at them a second and then began to giggle and talk to each other about the convent. They sat in the swing together and Wendell and Cory sat on the banisters together. They sat like monkeys, their knees on a level with their shoulders and their arms hanging down between. They were short thin boys with red faces and high cheekbones and pale seed-like eyes. They had brought a harmonica and a guitar. One of them began to blow softly on the mouth organ, watching the girls over it, and the other started strumming the guitar and then began to sing, not watching them but keeping his head tilted upward as if he were only interested in hearing himself. He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.
The child was standing on a barrel pushed into some bushes at the side of the house, her face on a level with the porch floor. The sun was going down and the sky was turning a bruised violet color that seemed to be connected with the sweet mournful sound of the music. Wendell began to smile as he sang and to look at the girls. He looked at Susan with a dog-like loving look and sang,
“I’ve found a friend in Jesus,
He’s everything to me,
He’s the lily of the valley,
He’s the One who’s set me free!”
Then he turned the same look on Joanne and sang
“A wall of fire about me,
I’ve nothing now to fear,
He’s the My of the valley,
And I’ll always have Him near!”
The girls looked at each other and held their lips stiff so as not to giggle but Susan let out one anyway and clapped her hand on her mouth. The singer frowned and for a few seconds only strummed the guitar. Then he began “The Old Rugged Cross” and they listened politely but when he had finished they said, “Let us sing one!” and before he could start another, they began to sing with their convent-trained voices,
“Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur Cernui:
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:”
The child watched the boys’ solemn faces turn with perplexed frowning stares at each other as if they were uncertain whether they were being made fun of.
“Praestct fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.
Genitori, Genitoque
Laus et jubilatio
Salus, honor, virtus quoque…”
The boys’ faces were dark red in the gray-purple light. They looked fierce and startled.
“Sit et benedictio;
Procedenti ab utroque
Compar sit laudatio.
Amen.”
The girls dragged out the Amen and then there was a silence.
“That must be Jew singing,” Wendell said and began to tune the guitar.
The girls giggled idiotically but the child stamped her foot on the barrel. “You big dumb ox!” she shouted. “You big dumb Church of God ox!” she roared and fell off the barrel and scrambled up and shot around the corner of the house as they jumped from the banister to see who was shouting.
Her mother had arranged for them to have supper in the back yard and she had a table laid out there under some Japanese lanterns that she pulled out for garden parties. “I ain’t eating with them,” the child said and snatched her plate off the table and carried it to the kitchen and sat down with the thin blue-gummed cook and ate her supper.
“Howcome you be so ugly sometime?” the cook asked.
“Those stupid idiots,” the child said.
The lanterns gilded the leaves of the trees orange on the level where they hung and above them was black-green and below them were different dim muted colors that made the girls sitting at the table look prettier than they were. From time to time, the child turned her head and glared out the kitchen window at the scene below.
“God could strike you deaf dumb and blind,” the cook said, “and then you wouldn’t be as smart as you is.”
“I would still be smarter than some,” the child said.
After supper they left for the fair. She wanted to go to the fair but not with them so even if they had asked her she wouldn’t have gone. She went upstairs and paced the long bedroom with her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust forward and an expression, fierce and dreamy both, on her face. She didn’t turn on the electric light but let the darkness collect and make the room smaller and more private. At regular intervals a light crossed the open window and threw shadows on the wall. She stopped and stood looking out over the dark slopes, past where the pond glinted silver, past the wall of woods to the speckled sky where a long finger of light was revolving up and around and away, searching the air as if it were hunting for the lost sun. It was the beacon light from the fair.
She could hear the distant sound of the calliope and she saw in her head all the tents raised up in a kind of gold sawdust light and the diamond ring of the ferris wheel going around and around up in the air and down again and the screeking merry-go-round going around and around on the ground. A fair lasted five or six days and there was a special afternoon for school children and a special night for niggers. She had gone last year on the afternoon for school children and had seen the monkeys and the fat man and had ridden on the ferris wheel. Certain tents were closed then because they contained things that would be known only to grown people but she had looked with interest at the advertising on the closed tents, at the faded-looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces like the faces of the martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier. She had imagined that what was inside these tents concerned medicine and she had made up her mind to be a doctor when she grew up.
She had since changed and decided to be an engineer but as she looked out the window and followed the revolving searchlight as it widened and shortened and wheeled in its are, she felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint. She did not steal or murder but she was a born liar and slothful and she sassed her mother and was deliberately ugly to almost everybody. She was eaten up also with the sin of Pride, the worst one. She made fun of the Baptist preacher who came to the school at commencement to give the devotional. She would pull down her mouth and hold her forehead as if she were in agony and groan, “Fawther, we thank Thee,” exactly the way he did and she had been told many times not to do it. She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
She could stand to be shot but not to be burned in oil. She didn’t know if she could stand to be torn to pieces by lions or not. She began to prepare her martyrdom, seeing herself in a pair of tights in a great arena, lit by the early Christians hanging in cages of fire, making a gold dusty light that fell on her and the lions. The first lion charged forward and fell at her feet, converted. A whole series of lions did the same. The lions liked her so much she even slept with them and finally the Romans were obliged to burn her but to their astonishment she would not burn down and finding she was so hard to kill, they finally cut off her heal very quickly with a sword and she went immediately to heaven. She rehearsed this several times, returning each time at the entrance of Paradise to the lions.
Finally she got up from the window and got ready for bed and got in without saying her prayers. There were two heavy double beds in the room. The girls were occupying the other one and she tried to think of something cold and clammy that she could hide in their bed but her thought was fruitless. She didn’t have anything she could think of, like a chicken carcass or a piece of beef liver. The sound of the calliope coming through the window kept her awake and she remembered that she hadn’t said her prayers and got up and knelt down and began them. She took a running start and went through to the other side of the Apostle’s Creed and then hung by her chin on the side of the bed, empty-minded. Her prayers, when she remembered to say them, were usually perfunctory but sometimes when she had done something wrong or heard music or lost something, or sometimes for no reason at all, she would be moved to fervor and would think of Christ on the long journey to Calvary, crushed three times on the rough cross. Her mind would stay on this a while and then get empty and when something roused her, she would find that she was thinking of a different thing entirely, of some dog or some girl or something she was going to do some day. Tonight, remembering Wendell and Cory, she was filled with thanksgiving and almost weeping with delight, she said, “Lord, Lord, thank You that I’m not in the Church of God, thank You Lord, thank You!” and got back in bed and kept repeating it until she went to sleep.
The girls came in at a quarter to twelve and waked her up with their giggling. They turned on the small blue-shaded lamp to see to get undressed by and their skinny shadows climbed up the wall and broke and continued moving about softly on the ceiling. The child sat up to hear what all they had seen at the fair. Susan had a plastic pistol full of cheap candy and Joanne a pasteboard cat with red polka dots on it. “Did you see the monkeys dance?” the child asked. “Did you see that fat man and those midgets?”
“All kinds of freaks,” Joanne said. And then she said to Susan, “I enjoyed it all but the you-know-what,” and her face assumed a peculiar expression as if she had bit into something that she didn’t know if she liked or not.
The other stood still and shook her head once and nodded slightly at the child. “Little pitchers,” she said in a low voice but the child heard it and her heart began to beat very fast.
She got out of her bed and climbed onto the footboard of theirs.
They turned off the light and got in but she didn’t move. She sat there, looking hard at them until their faces were well defined the dark. “I’m not as old as you all,” she said, “but I’m about million times smarter.”
“There are some things,” Susan said, “that a child of your age doesn’t know,” and they both began to giggle.
“Go back to your own bed,” Joanne said.
The child didn’t move. “One time,” she said, her voice hollow sounding in the dark, “I saw this rabbit have rabbits.”
There was a silence. Then Susan said, “How?” in an indifferent tone and she knew that she had them. She said she wouldn’t tell until they told about the you-know-what. Actually she had never seen a rabbit have rabbits but she forgot this as they began to tell what they had seen in the tent.
It had been a freak with a particular name but they couldn’t remember the name. The tent where it was had been divided into two parts by a black curtain, one side for men and one for women. The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear. The stage ran all the way across the front. The girls heard the freak say to the men, “I’m going to show you this and if you laugh, God may strike you the same way.” The freak had a country voice, slow and nasal and neither high nor low, just flat. “God made me thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing HIS way. I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I’m making the best of it. I don’t dispute hit.” Then there was a long silence on the other side of the tent and finally the freak left the men and came over onto the women’s side and said the same thing.
The child felt every muscle strained as if she were hearing the answer to a riddle that was more puzzling than the riddle itself. “You mean it had two heads?” she said.
“No,” Susan said, “it was a man and woman both. It pulled up its dress and showed us. It had on a blue dress.”
The child wanted to ask how it could be a man and woman both without two heads but she did not. She wanted to get back into her own bed and think it out and she began to climb down off the footboard.
“What about the rabbit?” Joanne asked.
The child stopped and only her be: appeared, over the footboard, abstracted, absent. “It spit them out of its mouth.” she said, “six of them.”
She lay in bed trying to picture the tent with the freak walking from side to side but she was too sleepy to figure it out. She was better able to see the faces of the country people watching, the men more solemn than they were in church, and the women stern and polite, with painted-looking eyes, standing as if they were waiting for the first note of the piano to begin the hymn. She could hear the freak saying, “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and the people saying, “Amen. Amen.”
“God done this to me and I praise Him.”
“Amen. Amen.”
“He could strike you this away.”
“Amen. Amen.”
“But he has not,”
“Amen.”
“Raise yourself up. A temple of tile Holy Ghost. You! You are God’s temple, don’t you know? Don’t you know? God’s Spirit has a dwelling in you, don’t you know?”
“Amen. Amen.”
“If anybody desecrates the temple Of God, God will bring him to ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you thisaway. A temple of God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen.”
“I am a temple of the Holy Ghost.’
“Amen.”
The people began to slap their hands without making a loud noise and with a regular beat between the Amens, more and more softly, as if they knew there was a child near, half asleep.
The next afternoon the girls put on their brown convent uniforms again and the child and her mot her took them back to Mount St. Scholastica. “Oh glory, oh Pete!” they said. “Back to the salt mines.” Alonzo Myers drove them and the child sat in front with him and her mother sat in back between the two girls, telling them such things as how pleased she was to have had them and how they must come back again and then about the good times she and their mothers had had when they were girls at the convent. The child didn’t listen to any of this twaddle but kept as close to the locked door as she could get and held her head out the window. They had thought Alonzo would smell better on Sunday but he did not. With her hair blowing over her face she could look directly into the ivory sun which was framed in the middle of the blue afternoon but when she pulled it away from her eyes she had to squint.
Mount St. Scholastica was a red brick house set back in a garden in the center of town. There was a filling station on one side of and a firehouse on the other. It had a high black grillework fence around it and narrow bricked walks between old trees and japonica bushes that were heavy with blooms. A big moon-faced nun came bustling to the door to let them in and embraced her mother and would have done the same to her but that she stuck out her hand and preserved a frigid frown, looking just past the sister’s shoes at the wainscoting. They had a tendency to kiss even homely children, but the nun shook her hand vigorously and even cracked her knuckles a little and said she must come to the chapel, that benediction was just beginning. You put your foot in their door and they got you praying, the child thought as they hurried down the polished corridor.
You’d think she had to catch a train, she continued in the same ugly vein as they entered the chapel when the sisters were kneeling on one side and the girls, all in brown uniforms, on the other. The chapel smelled of incense. It was light green and gold, a series of springing arches that ended with the one over the altar where the priest was kneeling in front of the monstrance, bowed low. A small boy in a surplice was standing behind him, swinging the censer. The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the “Tantum Ergo” before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Help me not to be so mean, she began mechanically. Help me not to give her so much sass. Help me not to talk like I do. Her mind began to get quiet and then empty but when the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it, she was thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, “I don’t dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be.”
As they were leaving the convent door, the big nun swooped down on her mischievously and nearly smothered her in the black habit, mashing the side of her face into the crucifix hitched onto her belt and then holding her off and looking at her with little periwinkle eyes.
On the way home she and her mother sat in the back and Alonzo drove by himself in the front. The child observed three folds of fat in the back of his neck and noted that his ears were pointed almost like a pig’s. Her mother, making conversation, asked him if he had gone to the fair.
“Gone,” he said, “and never missed a thing and it was good I gone when I did because they ain’t going to have it next week like they said they was.”
“Why?” asked her mother.
“They shut it on down,” he said. “Some of the preachers from town gone out and inspected it and got the police to shut it on down.”
Her mother let the conversation drop and the child’s round face was lost in thought. She turned it toward the window and looked out over a stretch of pasture land that rose and fell with a gathering greenness until it touched the dark woods. The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.
The Artificial Nigger (1955)
Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards the color of silver and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head’s trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him.
Mr. Head could have said to it that age was a choice blessing and that only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of life that makes him asuitable guide for the young. This, at least, had been his own experience.
He sat up and grasped the iron posts at the foot of his bed and raised himself until he could see the face on the alarm clock which sat on an overturned bucket beside the chair. The hour was two in the morning. The alarm on the clock did notwork but he was not dependent on any mechanical means to awaken him. Sixty years had not dulled his responses; his physical reactions, like his moral ones, were guided by his will and strong character, and these could be seen plainly in his features. He had a long tube-like face with a long rounded open jaw and a long depressed nose. His eyes were alert but quiet, and in the miraculous moonlight they had a look of composure and of ancient wisdom as if they belonged to one of the great guides of men. He might have been Vergil summoned in the middle of the night to go to Dante or better, Raphael, awakened by a blast of God’s light to fly to the side of Tobias. The only dark spot in the room was Nelson’s pallet, underneath the shadow of the window.
Nelson was hunched over on his side, his knees under his chin and his heels under his bottom. His new suit and hat were in the boxes that they had been sent in and these were on the floor at the foot of the pallet where he could get his hands on them as soon as he woke up. The step jar, out of the shadow and made snow-white in the moonlight, appeared to stand guard over him like a small personal angel. Mr. Head lay back down, feeling entirely confident that he could carry out the moral mission of the coming day. He meant to be up before Nelson and to have the breakfast cooking by the time he awakened. The boy was always irked when Mr. Head was the first up. They would have to leave the house at four to get to the railroad junction by five-thirty. The train was to stop for them at five forty-five and they had to be there on time for this train was stopping merely to accommodate them.
This would be the boy’s first trip to the city though he claimed it would be his second because he had been born there. Mr. Head had tried to point out to him that when he was born he didn’t have the intelligence to determine his whereabouts but this had made no impression on the child at all and he continued to insist that this was to be his second trip. It would be Mr. Head’s third trip. Nelson had said, “I will’ve already been there twict and I ain’t but ten.”
Mr. Head had contradicted him.
“If you ain’t been there in fifteen years, how you know you’ll be able to find your way about?” Nelson had asked. “How you know it hasn’t changed some?”
“Have you ever,” Mr. Head had asked, “seen me lost?”
Nelson certainly had not but he was a child who was never satisfied until he had given an impudent answer and he replied, “It’s nowhere around here to get lost at.”
“The day is going to come,” Mr. Head prophesied, “when you’ll find you ain’t as smart as you think you are.” He had been thinking about this trip for several months but it was for the most part in moral terms that he conceived it. It was to be a lesson that the boy would never forget. He was to find out from it that he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in a city. He was to find out that the city is not a great place. Mr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life. He fell asleep thinking how the boy would at last find out that he was not as smart as he thought he was.
He was awakened at three-thirty by the smell of fatback frying and he leaped off his cot. The pallet was empty and the clothes boxes had been thrown open. He put on his trousers and ran into the other room. The boy had a corn pone on cooking and had fried the meat. He was sitting in the half-dark at the table, drinking cold coffee out of a can. He had on his new suit and his new gray hat pulled low over his eyes. It was too big for him but they had ordered it a size large because they expected his head to grow. He didn’t say anything but his entire figure suggested satisfaction at having arisen before Mr. Head.
Mr. Head went to the stove and brought the meat to the table in the skillet.”It’s no hurry,” he said. “You’ll get there soon enough and it’s no guarantee you’lllike it when you do neither,” and he sat down across from the boy whose hatteetered back slowly to reveal a fiercely expressionless face, very much the sameshape as the old man’s. They were grandfather and grandson but they looked enough alike to be brothers and brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head had ayouthful expression by daylight, while the boy’s look was ancient, as if he kneweverything already and would be pleased to forget it.
Mr. Head had once had a wife and daughter and when the wife died, the daughter ran away and returned after an interval with Nelson. Then one morning, without getting out of bed, she died and left Mr. Head with sole care of the year-old child. He had made the mistake of telling Nelson that he had been born in Atlanta. If he hadn’t told him that, Nelson couldn’t have insisted that this was going to be his second trip.
“You may not like it a bit,” Mr. Head continued. “It’ll be full of niggers.”
The boy made a face as if he could handle a nigger.
“All right,” Mr. Head said. “You ain’t ever seen a nigger.”
“You wasn’t up very early,” Nelson said.
“You ain’t ever seen a nigger,” Mr. Head repeated. “There hasn’t been a nigger in this county since we run that one out twelve years ago and that was before you were born.” He looked at the boy as if he were daring him to say he had ever seen a Negro.
“How you know I never saw a nigger when I lived there before?” Nelson asked. “I probably saw a lot of niggers.”
“If you seen one you didn’t know what he was,” Mr. Head said, completely exasperated. “A six-month-old child don’t know a nigger from anybody else.”
“I reckon I’ll know a nigger if I see one,” the boy said and got up and straightened his slick sharply creased gray hat and went outside to the privy.
They reached the junction some time before the train was due to arrive and stood about two feet from the first set of tracks. Mr. Head carried a paper sack with some biscuits and a can of sardines in it for their lunch. A coarse-looking orange-colored sun coming up behind the east range of mountains was making the sky a dull red behind them, but in front of them it was still gray and they faced a gray transparent moon, hardly stronger than a thumbprint and completely without light. A small tin switch box and a black fuel tank were all there was to mark the place as a junction; the tracks were double and did not converge again until they were hidden behind the bends at either end of the clearing. Trains passing appeared to emerge from a tunnel of trees and, hit for a second by the cold sky, vanish terrified into the woods again. Mr. Head had had to make special arrangements with the ticket agent to have this train stop and he was secretly afraid it would not, in which case, he knew Nelson would say, “I never thought no train was going to stopfor you.” Under the useless morning moon the tracks looked white and fragile. Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.
Then suddenly, before Mr. Head could make up his mind to turn back, there was a deep warning bleat and the train appeared, gliding very slowly, almost silently around the bend of trees about two hundred yards down the track, with one yellow front light shining. Mr. Head was still not certain it would stop and he felt it would make an even bigger idiot of him if it went by slowly. Both he and Nelson, however, were prepared to ignore the train if it passed them.
The engine charged by, filling their noses with the smell of hot metal and then the second coach came to a stop exactly where they were standing. A conductor with the face of an ancient bloated bulldog was on the step as if he expected them, though he did not look as if it mattered one way or the other to him if they got on or not. “To the right,” he said.
Their entry took only a fraction of a second and the train was already speeding on as they entered the quiet car. Most of the travelers were still sleeping, some with their heads hanging off the chair arms, some stretched across two seats, and some sprawled out with their feet in the aisle. Mr. Head saw two unoccupied seats and pushed Nelson toward them. “Get in there by the winder,” he said in his normal voice which was very loud at this hour of the morning. “Nobody cares if you sit there because it’s nobody in it. Sit right there.”
“I heard you,” the boy muttered. “It’s no use in you yelling,” and he sat down and turned his head to the glass. There he saw a pale ghost-like face scowling at him beneath the brim of a pale ghost-like hat. His grandfather, looking quickly too, saw a different ghost, pale but grinning, under a black hat.
Mr. Head sat down and settled himself and took out his ticket and started reading aloud everything that was printed on it. People began to stir. Several woke up and stared at him. “Take off your hat,” he said to Nelson and took off his own and put it on his knee. He had a small amount of white hair that had turned tobac cocolored over the years and this lay flat across the back of his head. The front of hishead was bald and creased. Nelson took off his hat and put it on his knee and they waited for the conductor to come ask for their tickets.
The man across the aisle from them was spread out over two seats, his feet propped on the window and his head jutting into the aisle. He had on a light blue suit and a yellow shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His eyes had just opened and Mr. Head was ready to introduce himself when the conductor came up from behind and growled, “Tickets.”
When the conductor had gone, Mr. Head gave Nelson the return half of his ticket and said, “Now put that in your pocket and don’t lose it or you’ll have to stayin the city.”
“Maybe I will,” Nelson said as if this were a reasonable suggestion. Mr. Head ignored him. “First time this boy has ever been on a train,” he explained to the man across the aisle, who was sitting up now on the edge of his seat with both feet on the floor.
Nelson jerked his hat on again and turned angrily to the window.
“He’s never seen anything before,” Mr. Head continued. “Ignorant as the dayhe was born, but I mean for him to get his fill once and for all.”
The boy leaned forward, across his grandfather and toward the stranger. “l was born in the city,” he said. “l was born there. This is my second trip.” He said itin a high positive voice but the man across the aisle didn’t look as if he understood. There were heavy purple circles under his eyes.
Mr. Head reached across the aisle and tapped him on the arm. “The thing to do with a boy,” he said sagely, “is to show him all it is to show. Don’t hold nothing back.”
“Yeah,” the man said. He gazed down at his swollen feet and lifted the left one about ten inches from the floor. After a minute he put it down and lifted the other. All through the car people began to get up and move about and yawn and stretch. Separate voices could be heard here and there and then a general hum. Suddenly Mr. Head’s serene expression changed. His mouth almost closed and alight, fierce and cautious both, came into his eyes. He was looking down the length of the car. Without turning, he caught Nelson by the arm and pulled him forward. “Look,” he said.
A huge coffee-colored man was coming slowly forward. He had on a light suit and a yellow satin tie with a ruby pin in it. One of his hands rested on his stomach which rode majestically under his buttoned coat, and in the other he held the head of a black walking stick that he picked up an set down with a deliberate outward motion each time he took a step. He was proceeding very slowly, his large brown eyes gazing over the heads of the passengers. He had a small white mustache and white crinkly hair. Behind him there were two young women, both coffee-colored, one in a yellow dress and one in a green. Their progress was kept at the rate of his and they chatted in low throaty voices as they followed him.
Mr. Head’s grip was tightening insistently on Nelson’s arm. As the procession passed them, the light from a sapphire ring on the brown hand that picked up the cane reflected in Mr. Head’s eye, but he did not look up nor did the tremendous man look at him. The group proceeded up the rest of the aisle and out of the car. Mr. Head’s grip on Nelson’s arm loosened. “What was that?” he asked.
“A man,” the boy said and gave him an indignant look as if he were tired of having his intelligence insulted.
“What kind of a man?” Mr. Head persisted, his voice expressionless.
“A fat man,” Nelson said. He was beginning to feel that he had better be cautious.
“You don’t know what kind?” Mr. Head said in a final tone.
“An old man,” the boy said and had a sudden foreboding that he was not going to enjoy the day.
“That was a nigger,” Mr. Head said and sat back.
Nelson jumped up on the seat and stood looking backward to the end of the car but the Negro had gone.
“I’d of thought you’d know a nigger since you seen so many when you was inthe city on your first visit,” Mr. Head continued. “That’s his first nigger,” he said tothe man across the aisle.
The boy slid down into the seat. “You said they were black,” he said in anangry voice. “You never said they were tan. How do you expect me to knowanything when you don’t tell me right?”
“You’re just ignorant is all,” Mr. Head said and he got up and moved over in the vacant seat by the man across the aisle.
Nelson turned backward again and looked where the Negro had disappeared. He felt that the Negro had deliberately walked down the aisle in order to make a fool of him and he hated him with a fierce raw fresh hate; and also, he understood now why his grandfather disliked them. He looked toward the window and the face there seemed to suggest that he might be inadequate to the day’s exactions. He wondered if he would even recognize the city when they came to it.
After he had told several stories, Mr. Head realized that the man he was talking to was asleep and he got up and suggested to Nelson that they walk over the train and see the parts of it. He particularly wanted the boy to see the toilet so they went first to the men’s room and examined the plumbing. Mr. Head demonstrated the icewater cooler as if he had invented it and showed Nelson the bowl with thesingle spigot where the travelers brushed their teeth. They went through several cars and came to the diner.
This was the most elegant car in the train. It was painted a rich egg-yellow and had a wine-colored carpet on the floor. There were wide windows over the tables and great spaces of the rolling view were caught in miniature in the sides of the coffee pots and in the glasses. Three very black Negroes in white suits and aprons were running up and down the aisle, swinging trays and bowing and bending over the travelers eating breakfast. One of them rushed up to Mr. Head and Nelson and said, holding up two fingers, “Space for two!” but Mr. Head replied in a loud voice, “We eaten before we left!”
The waiter wore large brown spectacles that increased the size of his eye whites. “Stan’ aside then please,” he said with an airy wave of the arm as if he were brushing aside flies.
Neither Nelson nor Mr. Head moved a fraction of an inch. “Look,” Mr. Head said.
The near corner of the diner, containing two tables, was set off from the rest by a saffron-colored curtain. One table was set but empty but at the other, facing them, his back to the drape, sat the tremendous Negro. He was speaking in a soft voice to the two women while he buttered a muffin. He had a heavy sad face and his neck bulged over his white collar on either side. “They rope them off,” Mr. Head explained. Then he said, “Let’s go see the kitchen,” and they walked the length ofthe diner but the black waiter was coming fast behind them.
“Passengers are not allowed in the kitchen!” he said in a haughty voice. “Passengers are NOT allowed in the kitchen!”
Mr. Head stopped where he was and turned. “And there’s good reason for that,” he shouted into the Negro’s chest, “because the cockroaches would run the passengers out!”
All the travelers laughed and Mr. Head and Nelson walked out, grinning. Mr. Head was known at home for his quick wit and Nelson felt a sudden keen pride in him. He realized the old man would be his only support in the strange place they were approaching. He would be entirely alone in the world if he were ever lost from his grandfather. A terrible excitement shook him and he wanted to take hold of Mr. Head’s coat and hold on like a child.
As they went back to their seats they could see through the passing windows that the countryside was becoming speckled with small houses and shacks and that a highway ran alongside the train. Cars sped by on it, very small and fast. Nelson felt that there was less breath in the air than there had been thirty minutes ago. The man across the aisle had left and there was no one near for Mr. Head to hold a conversation with so he looked out the window, through his own reflection, and read aloud the names of the buildings they were passing. “The Dixie Chemical Corp!” he announced. “Southern Maid Flour! Dixie Doors! Southern Belle Cotton Products! Patty’s Peanut Butter! Southern Mammy Cane Syrup!”
“Hush up!” Nelson hissed.
All over the car people were beginning to get up and take their luggage of fthe overhead racks. Women were putting on their coats and hats. The conductor stuck his head in the car and snarled, ‘“Firstopppppmry,”,,, and Nelson lunged out of his sitting position, trembling. Mr. Head pushed him down by the shoulder.
“Keep your seat,” he said in dignified tones. “The first stop is on the edge of town. The second stop is at the main railroad station.” He had come by this knowledge on his first trip when he had got off at the first stop and had had to pay a man fifteen cents to take him into the heart of town. Nelson sat back down, very pale. For the first time in his life, he understood that his grandfather was indispensable to him.
The train stopped and let off a few passengers and glided on as if it had never ceased moving. Outside, behind rows of brown rickety houses, a line of blue buildings stood up, and beyond them a pale rose-gray sky faded away to nothing. The train moved into the railroad yard. Looking down, Nelson saw lines and lines of silver tracks multiplying and criss-crossing. Then before he could start counting them, the face in the window started out at him, gray but distinct, and he looked the other way. The train was in the station. Both he and Mr. Head jumped up and ran to the door. Neither noticed that they had left the paper sack with the lunch in it on the seat.
They walked stiffly through the small station and came out of a heavy door into the squall of traffic. Crowds were hurrying to work. Nelson didn’t know where to look. Mr. Head leaned against the side of the building and glared in front of him.
Finally Nelson said, “Well, how do you see what all it is to see?”
Mr. Head didn’t answer. Then as if the sight of people passing had given him the clue, he said, “You walk,” and started off down the street. Nelson followed, steadying his hat. So many sights and sounds were flooding in on him that for the first block he hardly knew what he was seeing. At the second corner, Mr. Head turned and looked behind him at the station they had left, a putty-colored terminal with a concrete dome on top. He thought that if he could keep the dome always in sight, he would be able to get back in the afternoon to catch the train again.
As they walked along, Nelson began to distinguish details and take note of the store windows, jammed with every kind of equipment hardware, drygoods, chicken feed, liquor. They passed one that Mr. Head called his particular attention to where you walked in and sat on a chair with your feet upon two rests and let a Negro polish your shoes. They walked slowly and stopped and stood at the entrances so he could see what went on in each place but they did not go into any of them. Mr. Head was determined not to go into any city store because on his first trip here, he had got lost in a large one and bad found his way out only after many people had insulted him.
They came in the middle of the next block to a store that had a weighing machine in front of it and they both in turn stepped up on it and put in a penny and received a ticket. Mr. Head’s ticket said, “You weigh 120 pounds. You are upright and brave and all your friends admire you.” He put the ticket in his pocket, surprised that the machine should have got his character correct but his weight wrong, for he had weighed on a grain scale not long before and knew he weighed 110. Nelson’s ticket said, “You weigh 98 pounds. You have a great destiny ahead of you but beware of dark women. Nelson did not know any women and he weighed only 68 pounds but Mr. Head pointed out that the machine had probably printed the number upside down, meaning the 9 for a 6.
They walked on and at the end of five blocks the dome of the terminal sank out of sight and Mr. Head turned to the left. Nelson could have stood in front of every store window for an hour if there had not been an other more interesting one next to it. Suddenly he said, “I was born here!” Mr. Head turned and looked at him with horror. There was a sweaty brightness about his face. “This is where I come from!” he said.
Mr. Head was appalled. He saw the moment had come for drastic action. “Lemme show you one thing you ain’t seen yet,” he said and took him to the corner where there was a sewer entrance. “Squat down,” he said, “and stick you head in there,” and he held the back of the boy’s coat while he got down and put his head in the sewer. He drew it back quickly, hearing a gurgling in the depths under the sidewalk. Then Mr. Head explained the sewer system, how the entire city was underlined with it, how it contained all the drainage and was full of rats and how a man could slide into it and be sucked along down endless pitch black tunnels. At any minute any man in the city might be sucked into the sewer and never heard from again. He described it so well that Nelson was for some seconds shaken. He connected the sewer passages with the entrance to hell and understood for the first time how the world was put together in its lower parts. He drew away from the curb.
Then he said, “Yes, but you can stay away from the holes,” and his face took on that stubborn look that was so exasperating to his grandfather. “This is where Icome from!” he said.
Mr. Head was dismayed but he only muttered, “You’ll get your fill,” and they walked on. At the end of two more blocks he turned to the left, feeling that he was circling the dome; and he was correct for in a half-hour they passed in front of the railroad station again. At first Nelson did not notice that he was seeing the same stores twice but when they passed the one where you put your feet on the rests while the Negro polished your shoes, he perceived that they were walking in a circle.
“We done been here!” he shouted. “I don’t believe you know where you’re at!”
“The direction just slipped my mind for a minute,” Mr. Head said and they turned down a different street. He still did not intend to let the dome get too faraway and after two blocks in their new direction, he turned to the left. This street contained two and three-story wooden dwellings. Anyone passing on the sidewalk could see into the rooms and Mr. Head, glancing through one window, saw a woman lying on an iron bed, looking out, with a sheet pulled over her. Her knowing expression shook him. A fierce-looking boy on a bicycle came driving down out of nowhere and he had to jump to the side to keep from being hit. “It’s nothing to them if they knock you down,” he said. “You better keep closer to me.”
They walked on for some time on streets like this before he remembered to turn again. The houses they were passing now were all unpainted and the wood inthem looked rotten; the street between was narrower. Nelson saw a colored man. Then another. Then another. “Niggers live in these houses,” he observed.
“Well come on and we’ll go some wheres else,” Mr. Head said. “We didn’t come to look at niggers,” and they turned down another street but they continued to see Negroes everywhere. Nelson’s skin began to prickle and they stepped along at a faster pace in order to leave the neighborhood as soon as possible. There wer ecolored men in their undershirts standing in the doors and colored women rocking on the sagging porches. Colored children played m the gutters and stopped what they were doing to look at them. Before long they began to pass rows of stores with colored customers in them but they didn’t pause at the entrances of these. Black eyesin black faces were watching them from every direction. “Yes,” Mr. Head said, “this is where you were born right here with all these niggers.”
Nelson scowled. “I think you done got us lost,” he said.
Mr. Head swung around sharply and looked for the dome. It was nowhere insight. “I ain’t got us lost either,” he said. “You’re just tired of walking.”
“I ain’t tired, I’m hungry,” Nelson said. “Give me a biscuit.”
They discovered then that they had lost the lunch.
“You were the one holding the sack,” Nelson said. “I would have kepaholt of it.”
“If you want to direct this trip, I’ll go on by myself and leave you right here, ” Mr. Head said and was pleased to see the boy turn white. However, he realized they were lost and drifting farther every minute from the station. He was hungry himself and beginning to be thirsty and since they had been in the colored neighborhood, t hey had both begun to sweat. Nelson had on his shoes and he was unaccustomed to them. The concrete sidewalks were very hard. They both wanted to find a place to sit down but this was impossible and they kept on walking, the boy muttering under his breath, “First you lost the sack and then you lost the way,” and Mr. Head growling from time to time, “Anybody wants to be from this nigger heaven can be from it!”
By now the sun was well forward in the sky. The odor of dinners cookingdrifted out to them. The Negroes were all at their doors to see them pass. “Whyn’tyou ast one of these niggers the way?” Nelson said. “You got us lost.”
“This is where you were born,” Mr. Head said. “You can ast one yourself ifyou want to.”
Nelson was afraid of the colored men and he didn’t want to be laughed at by the colored children. Up ahead he saw a large colored woman leaning in a doorway that opened onto the sidewalk. Her hair stood straight out from her head for abou tfour inches all around and she was resting on bare brown feet that turned pink at the sides. She had on a pink dress that showed her exact shape. As they came abreast of her, she lazily lifted one hand to her head and her fingers disappeared into her hair.
Nelson stopped. He felt his breath drawn up by the woman’s dark eyes. “How do you get back to town?” he said in a voice that did not sound like his own.
After a minute she said, “You in town now,” in a rich low tone that made Nelson feel as if a cool spray had been turned on him.
“How do you get back to the train?” he said in the same reedlike voice.
“You can catch you a car,” she said.
He understood she was making fun of him but he was too paralyzed even to scowl. He stood drinking in every detail of her. His eyes traveled up from her great knees to her forehead and then made a triangular path from the glistening sweat on her neck ‘down and across her tremendous bosom and over her bare arm back to where her fingers lay hidden in her hair. He suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before. He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel.
“You can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie,” she said.
Nelson would have collapsed at her feet if Mr. Head had not pulled him roughly away. “You act like you don’t have any sense!” the old man growled.
They hurried down the street and Nelson did not look back at the woman. He pushed his hat sharply forward over his face which was already burning with shame. The sneering ghost he had seen in the train window and all the foreboding feeling she had on the way returned to him and he remembered that his ticket from the scale had said to beware of dark women and that his grandfather’s had said he was upright and brave. He took hold of the old man’s hand, a sign of dependence that he seldom showed.
They headed down the street toward the car tracks where a long yellow rattling trolley was coming. Mr. Head had never boarded a streetcar and he let that one pass. Nelson was silent. From time to time his mouth trembled slightly but his grandfather, occupied with his own problems, paid him no attention. They stood onthe corner and neither looked at the Negroes who were passing, going about their business just as if they had been white, except that most of them stopped and eyed Mr. Head and Nelson. It occurred to Mr. Head that since the streetcar ran on tracks, they could simply follow the tracks. He gave Nelson a slight push and explained that they would follow the tracks on into the railroad station, walking, and they setoff.
Presently to their great relief they began to see white people again and Nelsonsat down on the sidewalk against the wall of a building. “I got to rest myself some, “he said. “You lost the sack and the direction. You can just wait on me to rest myself.”
“There’s the tracks in front of us,” Mr. Head said. “All we got to do is keep them in sight and you could have remembered the sack as good as me. This is where you were born. This is your old home town. This is your second trip. You ought to know how to do,” and he squatted down and continued in. this vein but the boy, easing his burning feet out of his shoes, did not answer.
“And standing there grinning like a chim-pan-zee while a nigger woman gives you direction. Great Gawd!” Mr. Head said.
“I never said I was nothing but born here,” the boy said in a shaky voice. ” I never said I would or wouldn’t like it. I never said I wanted to come. I only said I was born here and I never had nothing to do with that. I want to go home. I never wanted to come in the first place. It was all your big idea. How you know you ain’t following the tracks in the wrong direction?”
This last had occurred to Mr. Head too. “All these people are white,” he said.
“We ain’t passed here before,” Nelson said. This was a neighborhood of brickbuildings that might have been lived in or might not. A few empty automobiles wereparked along the curb and there was an occasional passerby. The heat of thepavement came up through Nelson’s thin suit. His eyelids began to droop, and after a few minutes his head tilted forward. His shoulders twitched once or twice and thenhe fell over on his side and lay sprawled in an exhausted fit of sleep.
Mr. Head watched him silently. He was very tired himself but they could not both sleep at the same time and he could not have slept anyway because he did not know where he was. In a few minutes Nelson would wake up, refreshed by his sleep and very cocky, and would begin complaining that he had lost the sack and the way. You’d have a mighty sorry time if I wasn’t here, Mr. Head thought; and then another idea occurred to him. He looked at the sprawled figure for several minutes; presently he stood up. He justified what he was going to do on the grounds that it is sometimes necessary to teach a child a lesson he won’t forget particularly when the child is always reasserting his position with some new impudence. He walked without a sound to the corner about twenty feet away and sat down on a covered garbage can in the alley where he could look out and watch Nelson wake up alone.
The boy was dozing fitfully, half conscious of vague noises and black forms moving up from some dark part of him into the light His face worked in his sleep and he had pulled his knees up under his chin. The sun shed a dull dry light on the narrow street; everything looked like exactly what it was. After a while Mr. Head, hunched like an old monkey on the garbage can lid, decided that if Nelson didn’t wake up soon, he would make a loud noise by bamming his foot against the can. He looked at his watch and discovered that it was two o’clock. Their train left at six and the possibility of missing it was too awful for him to think of. He kicked his foot backwards on the can and a hollow boom reverberated in the alley.
Nelson shot up onto his feet with a shout. He looked where his grandfather should have been and stared. He seemed to whirl several times and then, picking up his feet and throwing his head back, he dashed down the street like a wild maddened pony. Mr. Head jumped off the can and galloped after but the child was almost out of sight. He saw a streak of gray disappearing diagonally a block ahead. He ran as fast as he could, looking both ways down every intersection, but without sight of him again. Then as he passed the third intersection, completely winded, he saw about half a block down the street a scene that stopped him altogether. He crouched behind a trash box to watch and get his bearings.
Nelson was sitting with both legs spread out and by his side lay an elderly woman, screaming. Groceries were scattered about the sidewalk. A crowd o fwomen had already gathered to see justice done and Mr. Head distinctly heard theold woman on the pavement shout, “You’ve broken my ankle and your daddy’ll pay for it! Every nickel! Police! Police!” Several of the women were plucking at Nelson’s shoulder but the boy seemed too dazed to get up.
Something forced Mr. Head from behind the trash box and forward, but only at a creeping pace. He had never in his life been accosted by a policeman. The women were milling around Nelson as if they might suddenly all dive on him at once and tear him to pieces, and the old woman continued to scream that her ankle was broken and to call for an officer. Mr. Head came on so slowly that he could have been taking a backward step after each forward one, but when he was about ten feet away, Nelson saw him and sprang. The child caught him around the hips and clung panting against him.
The women all turned on Mr. Head. The injured one sat up and shouted, “You sir! You’ll pay every penny of my doctor’s bill that your boy has caused. He’s a juvenile delinquent! Where is an officer? Somebody take this man’s name and address!”
Mr. Head was trying to detach Nelson’s fingers from the flesh in the back ofhis legs. The old man’s head had lowered itself into his collar like a turtle’s; his eyeswere glazed with fear and caution.
“Your boy has broken my ankle!” the old woman shouted. “Police!”
Mr. Head sensed the approach of the policeman from behind. He stared straight ahead at the women who were massed in their fury like a solid wall to block his escape, “This is not my boy,” he said. “l never seen him before.”
He felt Nelson’s fingers fall out of his flesh.
The women dropped back, staring at him with horror, as if they were sore pulsed by a man who would deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to lay hands on him. Mr. Head walked on, through a space they silently cleared, and left Nelson behind. Ahead of him he saw nothing but a hollow tunnel that had once been the street.
The boy remained standing where he was, his neck craned forward and his hands hanging by his sides. His hat was jammed on his head so that there were no longer any creases in it. The injured woman got up and shook her fist at him and the others gave him pitying looks, but he didn’t notice any of them. There was no policeman in sight.
In a minute he began to move mechanically, making no effort to catch up with his grandfather but merely following at about twenty paces. They walked on for five blocks in this way. Mr. Head’s shoulders were sagging and his neck hung forward at such an angle that it was not visible from behind. He was afraid to turn his head. Finally he cut a short hopeful glance over his shoulder. Twenty feet behind him, he saw two small eyes piercing into his back like pitchfork prongs.
The boy was not of a forgiving nature but this was the first time he had ever had anything to forgive. Mr. Head had never disgraced himself before. After two more blocks, he turned and called over his shoulder in a high desperately gay voice, “Let’s us go get us a Co’ Cola somewheres!”
Nelson, with a dignity he had never shown before, turned and stood with his back to his grandfather.
Mr. Head began to feel the depth of his denial. His face as they walked on became all hollows and bare ridges. He saw nothing they were passing but he perceived that they had lost the car tracks. There was no dome to be seen anywhere and the afternoon was advancing. He knew that if dark overtook them in the city, they would be beaten and robbed. The speed of God’s justice was only what he expected for himself, but he could not stand to think that his sins would be visited upon Nelson and that even now, he was leading the boy to his doom.
They continued to walk on block after block through an endless section of small brick houses until Mr. Head almost fell over a water spigot sticking up about six inches off the edge of a grass plot. He had not had a drink of water since early morning but he felt he did not deserve it now. Then he thought that Nelson would be thirsty and they would both drink and be brought together. He squatted down and put his mouth to the nozzle and turned a cold stream of water into his throat. Then he called out in the high desperate voice, “Come on and getcher some water!”
This time the child stared through him for nearly sixty seconds. Mr. Head got up and walked on as if he had drunk poison. Nelson, though he had not had water since some he had drunk out of a paper cup on the train, passed by the spigot, disdaining to drink where his grandfather had. When Mr. Head realized this, he lost all hope. His face in the waning afternoon light looked ravaged and abandoned. He could feel the boy’s steady hate, traveling at an even pace behind him and he knew that (if by some miracle they escaped being murdered in the city) it would continuejust that way for the rest of his life. He knew that now he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before, a long old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end.
As for Nelson, his mind had frozen around his grandfather’s treachery as if he were trying to preserve it intact to present at the final judgment. He walked without looking to one side or the other, but every now and then his mouth would twitch and this was when he felt, from some remote place inside himself, a black mysterious form reach up as if it would melt his frozen vision in one hot grasp.
The sun dropped down behind a row of houses and hardly noticing, they passed into an elegant suburban section where mansions were set back from the road by lawns with birdbaths on them. Here everything was entirely deserted. For blocks they didn’t pass even a dog. The big white houses were like partially submerged icebergs in the distance. There were no sidewalks, only drives, and these wound around and around in endless ridiculous circles. Nelson made no move to come nearer to Mr. Head. The old man felt that if he saw a sewer entrance he would drop down into it and let himself be carried away; and he could imagine the boy standing by, watching with only a slight interest, while he disappeared.
A loud bark jarred him to attention and he looked up to see a fat man approaching with two bulldogs. He waved both arms like someone shipwrecked on a desert island. “I’m lost!” he called. “I’m lost and can’t find my way and me and this boy have got to catch this train and I can’t find the station. Oh Gawd I’m lost! Oh hep me Gawd I’m lost!”
The man, who was baldheaded and had on golf knickers, asked him what train he was trying to catch and Mr. Head began to get out his tickets, trembling so violently he could hardly hold them. Nelson had come up to within fifteen feet and stood watching.
“Well,” the fat man said, giving him back the tickets, “you won’t have time to get back to town to make this but you can catch it at the suburb stop. That’s three blocks from here,” and he began explaining how to get there.
Mr. Head stared as if he were slowly returning from the dead and when the man had finished and gone off with the dogs jumping at his heels, he turned to Nelson and said breathlessly, “We’re going to get home!”
The child was standing about ten feet away, his face bloodless under the gray hat. His eyes were triumphantly cold. There was no light in them, no feeling, no interest. He was merely there, a small figure, waiting. Home was nothing to him.
Mr. Head turned slowly. He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation. He didn’t care if he never made the train and if it had not been for what suddenly caught his attention, like a cry out of the gathering dusk, he might have forgotten there was a station to go to.
He had not walked five hundred yards down the road when he saw, within reach of him, the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over on a low yellow brickfence that curved around a wide lawn. The Negro was about Nelson’s size and h ewas pitched forward at an unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall had cracked. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon.
Mr. Head stood looking at him silently until Nelson stopped at a little distance. Then as the two of them stood there, Mr. Head breathed, “An artificial nigger!”
It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either. He was meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead.
“An artificial nigger!” Nelson repeated in Mr. Head’s exact tone.
The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets. Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now. He looked at Nelson and understood that he must say something to the child to show that he was still wise and in the look the boy returned he saw a hungry need for chat assurance. Nelson’s eyes seemed to implore him to explain once and for all the mystery of existence.
Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, “They ain’t got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one.”
After a second, the boy nodded with a strange shivering about his mouth, and said, “Let’s go home before we get ourselves lost again.”
Their train glided into the suburb stop just as they reached the station and they boarded it together, and ten minutes before it was due to arrive at the junction, they went to the door and stood ready to jump off if it did not stop; but it did, just as the moon, restored to its full splendor, sprang from a cloud and flooded the clearing with light. As they stepped off, the sage grass was shivering gently in shades of silver and the clinkers under their feet glittered with a fresh black light. The treetops, fencing the junction like the protecting walls of a garden, were darker than the sky which was hung with gigantic white clouds illuminated like lanterns.
Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world chat could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame chat he had so little ofit to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought him self a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no Sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.
Nelson, composing his expression under the shadow of his hat brim, watched him with a mixture of fatigue and suspicion, but as the train glided past them and disappeared like a frightened serpent into the woods, even his face lightened and he muttered, “I’m glad I’ve went once, but I’ll never go back again!”
Good Country People (1955)
Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of them figs you put up last summer.”
They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae. Joy called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last report.
Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I can stand him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days.
She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything—she would give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she had kept them four years.
Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.
When Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say, “I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not first been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs. Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place for a while, “You know, you’re the wheel behind the wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know it. I’ve always been quick. It’s some that are quicker than others.”
“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.
“It takes all kinds to make the world.”
“I always said it did myself.”
The girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for dinner; sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest they ate in the kitchen because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always managed to arrive at some point during the meal and to watch them finish it. She would stand in the doorway if it were summer but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on top of the refrigerator and look down at them, or she would stand by the gas heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly. Occasionally she would stand against the wall and roll her head from side to side. At no time was she in any hurry to leave. All this was very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a woman of great patience. She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them.
She had had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would want to be around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her husband long ago, needed someone to walk over the fields with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for these services, her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am LIKE I AM.”
Mrs. Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. Her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.
When Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her Joy to which the girl responded but in a purely mechanical way.
Hulga had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from taking walks with her mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when they occupied attention that might otherwise have been directed at her. At first she had thought she could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude to her. Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days together she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was always obscure; a direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to her face—these never touched her. And without warning one day, she began calling her Hulga.
She did not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been incensed but when she and the girl happened to be out of the house together, she would say something and add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon. She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga. However, Mrs. Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact. Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it had happened an hour ago.
When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making the awful noise but she made it—Mrs. Hopewell was certain—because it was ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be in her red kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would be sitting at the table, finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be hanging by her elbow outward from the refrigerator, looking down at the table. Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil and then stood over them with her arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her—a kind of indirect gaze divided between her and Mrs. Freeman—and would think that if she would only keep herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was nothing wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help. Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not.
Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it would have been better if the child had not taken the Ph. D. It had certainly not brought her out any and now that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had “gone through.” Anyhow, she would not have been strong enough to go again. The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply that she was still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and more like herself—bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said—without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full—“Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that on. She had only made the remark, hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone.
The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a school teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill.
This morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. “She thrown up four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in the night after three o’clock. Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble in the bureau drawer. All she did. Stand up there and see what she could run up on.”
“She’s got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversation she could possibly have had with him.
He was a tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that weighted him so heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door facing. He seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a cheerful voice, “Good morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the suitcase down on the mat. He was not a bad-looking young man though he had on a bright blue suit and yellow socks that were not pulled up far enough. He had prominent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.
“I’m Mrs. Hopewell,” she said.
“Oh!” he said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, “I saw it said ‘The Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!” and he burst out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel and under cover of a pant, he fell forward into her hall. It was rather as if the suitcase had moved first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he said and grabbed her hand. “I hope you are well!” and he laughed again and then all at once his face sobered completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and said, “Lady, I’ve come to speak of serious things.”
“Well, come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost ready. He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a straight chair and put the suitcase between his feet and glanced around the room as if he were sizing her up by it. Her silver gleamed on the two sideboards; she decided he had never been in a room as elegant as this.
“Mrs. Hopewell,” he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost intimate, “I know you believe in Chrustian service.”
“Well, yes,” she murmured.
“I know,” he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on one side, “that you’re a good woman. Friends have told me.”
Mrs. Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. “What are you selling?” she asked.
“Bibles,” the young man said and his eye raced around the room before he added, “I see you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one lack you got!”
Mrs. Hopewell could not say, “My daughter is an atheist and won’t let me keep the Bible in the parlor.” She said, stiffening slightly, “I keep my Bible by my bedside.” This was not the truth. It was in the attic somewhere.
“Lady,” he said, “the word of God ought to be in the parlor.”
“Well, I think that’s a matter of taste,” she began, “I think…”
“Lady,” he said, “for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every room in the house besides in his heart. I know you’re a Chrustian because I can see it in every line of your face.”
She stood up and said, “Well, young man, I don’t want to buy a Bible and I smell my dinner burning.”
He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth—not many people want to buy one nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!”
“You said a mouthful,” he said.
“Why, I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!” she said, stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”
His face had brightened. “I didn’t intraduce myself,” he said. “I’m Manley Pointer from out in the country around Willohobie, not even from a place, just from near a place.”
“You wait a minute,” she said. “I have to see about my dinner.” She went out to the kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had been listening.
“Get rid of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.”
Mrs. Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under the vegetables. “I can’t be rude to anybody,” she murmured and went back into the parlor.
He had opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee.
“I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “You don’t see any more real honest people unless you go way out in the country.”
“I know,” she said, “real genuine folks!” Through the crack in the door she heard a groan.
“I guess a lot of boys come telling you they’re working their way through college,” he said, “but I’m not going to tell you that. Somehow,” he said, “I don’t want to go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian service. See,” he said, lowering his voice, “I got this heart condition. I may not live long. When you know it’s something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then, lady…” He paused, with his mouth open, and stared at her.
He and Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling with tears but she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’d love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she heard herself say it.
“Yes mam,” he said in an abashed voice. “I would sher love to do that!”
Joy had given him one look on being introduced to him and then throughout the meal had not glanced at him again. He had addressed several remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hopewell could not understand deliberate rudeness, although she lived with it, and she felt she had always to overflow with hospitality to make up for Joy’s lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk about himself and he did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve and that his father had been crushed under a tree when he himself was eight years old. He had been crushed very badly, in fact, almost cut in two and was practically not recognizable. His mother had got along the best she could by hard working and she had always seen that her children went to Sunday School and that they read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen years old and he had been selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold seventy-seven Bibles and had the promise of two more sales. He wanted to become a missionary because he thought that was the way you could do most for people. “He who losest his life shall find it,” he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and earnest that Mrs. Hopewell would not for the world have smiled. He prevented his peas from sliding onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread which he later cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy observing sidewise how he handled his knife and fork and she saw too that every few minutes, the boy would dart a keen appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to attract her attention.
After dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs. Hopewell was left to talk with him. He told her again about his childhood and his father’s accident and about various things that had happened to him. Every five minutes or so she would stifle a yawn. He sat for two hours until finally she told him she must go because she had an appointment in town. He packed his Bibles and thanked her and prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped and wring her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said she would always be happy to see him.
Joy had been standing in the road, apparently looking at something in the distance, when he came down the steps toward her, bent to the side with his heavy valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her directly. Mrs. Hopewell could not hear what he said but she trembled to think what Joy would say to him. She could see that after a minute Joy said something and that then the boy began to speak again, making an excited gesture with his free hand. After a minute Joy said something else at which the boy began to speak once more. Then to her amazement, Mrs. Hopewell saw the two of them walk off together, toward the gate. Joy had walked all the way to the gate with him and Mrs. Hopewell could not imagine what they had said to each other, and she had not yet dared to ask.
Mrs. Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the refrigerator to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face her in order to seem to be listening. “Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night,” she said. “She had this sty.”
“Hill,” Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the garage?”
“Nome, he’s the one that goes to chiropractor school,” Mrs. Freeman said. “She had this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she says, ‘How?’ and he says, ‘You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I’ll show you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning,” Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.”
“I never heard of that before,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“He ast her to marry him before the Ordinary,” Mrs. Freeman went on, “and she told him she wasn’t going to be married in no office.”
“Well, Glynese is a fine girl,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Glynese and Carramae are both fine girls.”
“Carramae said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure felt sacred to him. She said he said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars for being married by a preacher.”
“How much would he take?” the girl asked from the stove.
“He said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars,” Mrs. Freeman repeated.
“Well we all have work to do,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Lyman said it just felt more sacred to him,” Mrs. Freeman said. “The doctor wants Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine. Says them cramps is coming from pressure. You know where I think it is?”
“She’ll be better in a few weeks,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“In the tube,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Else she wouldn’t be as sick as she is.”
Hulga had cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them to the table along with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat down carefully and began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by questions if for any reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could perceive her mother’s eye on her. The first roundabout question would be about the Bible salesman and she did not wish to bring it on. “How did he pop her neck?” she asked.
Mrs. Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck. She said he owned a ‘55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with only a ‘36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if he had a ‘32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman said what Glynese had said was a ‘36 Plymouth.
Mrs. Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese’s common sense. She said what she admired in those girls was their common sense. She said that reminded her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a young man selling Bibles. “Lord,” she said, “he bored me to death but he was so sincere and genuine I couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know,” she said, “—just the salt of the earth.”
“I seen him walk up,” Mrs. Freeman said, “and then later—I seen him walk off,” and Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight insinuation, that he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained expressionless but the color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow it down with the next spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her as if they had a secret together.
“Well, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go ‘round,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “It’s very good we aren’t all alike.”
“Some people are more alike than others,” Mrs. Freeman said.
Hulga got up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary, into her room and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o’clock at the gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it as a great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it. She had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface but that reached below the depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of. Their conversation yesterday had been of this kind.
He had stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was bony and sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it, and his look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered, “You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?”
The girl looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. “Yes,” she presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.
“It must have been mighty small!” he said triumphantly and shook all over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding finally into his gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression remained exactly the same.
“How old are you?” he asked softly.
She waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she said, “Seventeen.”
His smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a little lake. “I see you got a wooden leg,” he said. “I think you’re real brave. I think you’re real sweet.”
The girl stood blank and solid and silent.
“Walk to the gate with me,” he said. “You’re a brave sweet little thing and I liked you the minute I seen you walk in the door.”
Hulga began to move forward.
“What’s your name?” he asked, smiling down on the top of her head.
“Hulga,” she said.
“Hulga,” he murmured, “Hulga. Hulga. I never heard of anybody name Hulga before. You’re shy, aren’t you, Hulga?” he asked.
She nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant valise.
“I like girls that wear glasses,” he said. “I think a lot. I’m not like these people that a serious thought don’t ever enter their heads. It’s because I may die.”
“I may die too,” she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were very small and brown, glittering feverishly.
“Listen,” he said, “don’t you think some people was meant to meet on account of what all they got in common and all? Like they both think serious thoughts and all?” He shifted the valise to his other hand so that the hand nearest her was free. He caught hold of her elbow and shook it a little. “I don’t work on Saturday,” he said. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er the hills and far away. Picnics and things. Couldn’t we go on a picnic tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga,” he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his insides about to drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward her.
During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of them walked on the place until they came to the storage barn beyond the two back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. She imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful.
She set off for the gate at exactly ten o’clock, escaping without drawing Mrs. Hopewell’s attention. She didn’t take anything to eat, forgetting that food is usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty white shirt, and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar of it since she did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no one was there.
She looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling that she had been tricked, that he only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a bush on the opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was new and wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered if he had bought it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and white band around it and was slightly too large for him. He stepped from behind the bush still carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks sucked down in his shoes from walking. He crossed the highway and said, “I knew you’d come!”
The girl wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the valise and asked, “Why did you bring your Bibles?”
He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. “You can never tell when you’ll need the word of God, Hulga,” he said. She had a moment in which she doubted that this was actually happening and then they began to climb the embankment. They went down into the pasture toward the woods. The boy walked lightly by her side, bouncing on his toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy today; he even swung it. They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, “Where does your wooden leg join on?”
She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,” he said. “I only meant you’re so brave and all. I guess God takes care of you.”
“No,” she said, looking forward and walking fast, “I don’t even believe in God.”
At this he stopped and whistled. “No!” he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.
She walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat. “That’s very unusual for a girl,” he remarked, watching her out of the corner of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.
The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind’s control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.
He came along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root that she might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying blades of thorn vine until she had passed beyond them. She led the way and he came breathing heavily behind her. Then they came out on a sunlit hillside, sloping softly into another one a little smaller. Beyond, they could see the rusted top of the old barn where the extra hay was stored.
The hill was sprinkled with small pink weeds. “Then you ain’t saved?” he asked suddenly, stopping.
The girl smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. “In my economy,” she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in God.”
Nothing seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she walked on before he had the chance.
“Ain’t there somewheres we can sit down sometime?” he murmured, his voice softening toward the end of the sentence.
“In that barn,” she said.
They made for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a large two-story barn, cook and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led into the loft and said, “It’s too bad we can’t go up there.”
“Why can’t we?” she asked.
“Yer leg,” he said reverently.
The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down at him and said, “Well, come on if your coming,” and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.
“We won’t need the Bible,” she observed.
“You never can tell,” he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front opening of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue. The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not to interfere. When her glasses got in his way, he took them off of her and slipped them into his pocket.
The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and the kisses were sticky like a child’s. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy fretting of a child being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings. “You ain’t said you loved me none,” he whispered finally, pulling back from her. “You got to say that.”
She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She didn’t realize he had taken her glasses but this landscape could not seem exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close attention to her surroundings.
“You got to say it,” he repeated. “You got to say you love me.”
She was always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she began, “if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a word I use. I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.”
The boy was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,” he said.
The girl looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she murmured. “It’s just as well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”
The boy’s astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair. “Okay,” he almost whined, “but do you love me or don’tcher?”
“Yes,” she said and added, “in a sense. But I must tell you something. There mustn’t be anything dishonest between us.” She lifted his head and looked him in the eye. “I am thirty years old,” she said. “I have a number of degrees.”
The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”
“Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”
She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.
He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he whispered.
The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. “No,” she said.
“I known it,” he muttered, sitting up. “You’re just playing me for a sucker.”
“On no no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to see it?”
The boy gave her a long penetrating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.”
She sat staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, “All right,” it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his.
Very gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy’s face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, “Now show me how to take it off and on.”
She took it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself, handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. “See!” he said with a delighted child’s face. “Now I can do it myself!”
“Put it back on,” she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again. “Put it back on,” she said.
“Not yet,” he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. “Leave it off for awhile. You got me instead.”
She gave a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at. Different expressions raced back and forth over her face. Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood. Finally she pushed him off and said, “Put it back on me now.”
“Wait,” he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take a swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her, but like one mesmerized, she did not move.
Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured, “aren’t you just good country people?”
The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said, curling his lip slightly, “but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.”
“Give me my leg,” she said.
He pushed it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to have us a good time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one another good yet.”
“Give me my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.
“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. “You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!”
Her face was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect Christian, you’re…“
The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”
“Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. “I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.
Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”
Mrs. Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that simple,” she said. “I know I never could.”
You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead (1955)
FRANCIS MARION TARWATER’S uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon, and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still.
The old man had been Tarwater’s great uncle, or said he was, and they had always lived together so far as the child knew. His uncle had said he was seventy years of age at the time he had rescued him and undertaken to bring him up; he was eighty-four when he died. Tarwater figured this made his own age fourteen. His uncle had taught him figures, reading, writing, and historv beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment. Besides giving him a good education, he had rescued him from his only other connection, old Tarwater’s nephew, a school teacher who had no child of his own at the time and wanted this one of his dead sister’s to raise according to his own ideas. The old man was in a position to know what his ideas were.
He had lived for three months in the nephew’s house on what he had thought at the time was Charity but what he said he had found out was not Charity or anything like it. All the time he had lived there, the nephew had secretly been making a study of him. The nephew, who had taken him in under the name of Charity, had at the same time been creeping into his soul by the back door, asking him questions that meant more than one thing, planting traps around the house and watching him fall into them, and finally coming up with a written study of him for a school teacher magazine. The stench of his behavior had reached heaven and the Lord Himself had rescued the old man. He had sent him a rage of vision, had told him to fly with the orphan boy to the farthest part of the backwoods and raise him up to justify his Redemption. The Lord had assured him a long life and he had snatched the child from under the school teacher’s nose and taken him to live in a clearing that he had title to for his lifetime.
Eventually Rayber, the school teacher, had discovered where they were and had come out to the clearing to get the boy back. He had had to leave his car on the dirt road and walk a mile through the woods, on a path that appeared and disappeared, before he came to the corn patch with the gaunt two-story shack standing in the middle of it. The old man had been fond of recalling for Tarwater the red, sweating, bitten face of his nephew bobbing up and down through the corn and behind it the pink, flowered hat of a welfare woman he had brought along with him. The corn was planted up to two feet from the porch step, and as the nephew came out of it, the old man appeared in the door with his shotgun and said that he would shoot any foot that touched his step, and the two stood facing each other while the welfare woman bristled out of the corn like a peahen upset on the nest. The old man said if it hadn’t been for the welfare woman his nephew wouldn’t have taken a step, but she stood there waiting, pushing back the wisps of dyed red hair that were plastered on her long forehead. Both their faces were scratched and bleeding from thorn bushes, and the old man recalled a switch of blackberry bush hanging from the sleeve of the welfare woman’s blouse. She only had to let out her breath slowly as if she were releasing the last patience on earth and the nephew lifted his foot and set it down on the step and the old man shot him in the leg. The two of them had scuttled off, making a disappearing rattle in the corn, and the woman had screamed, “You knew he was crazy!”; but when they came out of the corn on the other side, old Tarwater had noted from the upstairs window where he had run that she had her arm around him and was holding him up while he hopped into the woods; and later he learned that he had married her though she was twice his age and he could only possibly get one child out of her. She had never let him come back again.
The morning the old man died, he came down and cooked the breakfast as usual and died before he got the first spoonful to his mouth. The downstairs of their shack was all kitchen, large and dark, with a wood tove in the center of it and a board table drawn up to the stove. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners, and scrap metal, wood shavings, old rope, ladders, and other tinder were wherever he or Tarwater had let them fall. They had slept in the kitchen until a wild cat sprang in the window one night and frightened him into carrying the bed upstairs where there were two empty rooms. He prophesied at the time that the stairsteps would take ten years off his life. At the moment of his death, he had sat down to his breakfast and lifted his knife in one square red hand halfway to his mouth and then, with a look of complete astonishment, he had lowered it until the hand rested on the edge of the plate and tilted it up off the table.
He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net of red threads. He had on a putty-colored hat with the brim turned up all around and over his undershirt a gray coat that had once been black. Tarwater, sitting across the table from him, saw red ropes appear in his face and a tremor pass over him. It was like the tremor of a quake that had begun at his heart and run outward and was just reaching the surface. His mouth twisted down sharply on one side and he remained exactly as he was, perfectly balanced, his back a good six inches from the chair back and his stomach caught just under the edge of the table. His eyes, dead silver, were focused on the boy across from him.
Tarwater felt the tremor transfer itself and run lightly over him. He knew the old man was dead without touching him and he continued to sit across the table from the corpse, finishing his breakfast in a kind of sullen embarrassment, as if he were in the presence of a new personality and couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally he said in a querulous tone, “Just hold your horses. I already told you I would do it right.” The voice sounded like a stranger’s voice, as if the death had changed him instead of the old man.
He got up and took his plate out the back door and set it down on the bottom step, and two long-legged black game roosters tore across the yard and finished what was on it. He sat down on a long pine box on the back porch, and his hands began absently to unravel a length of rope, while his long cross-shaped face stared ahead beyond the clearing over woods that ran in gray and purple folds until they touched the light-blue fortress line of trees set against the empty morning sky.
The clearing was not simply off the dirt road but off the wagon track and footpath, and the nearest neighbors, colored not white, still had to walk through the woods, pushing plum branches out of their way to get to it. The old man had started an acre of cotton to the left and had run it beyond the fence line almost up to the house on one side. The two strands of barbed wire ran through the middle of the patch. A line of fog, hump-shaped, was creeping toward it, ready like a white hound dog to crouch under and crawl across the yard.
“I’m going to move that fence,” Tarwater said. “I ain’t going to have my fence in the middle of a field.” The voice was loud and still strange and disagreeable and he finished the rest of his thought in his head: because this place is mine now whether I own it or not because I’m here and nobody can’t get me off. If any school teacher comes here to claim the property, I’ll kill him.
He had on a faded pair of overalls and a gray hat pulled down over his ears like a cap. He followed his uncle’s custom of never taking off his hat except in bed. He had always followed his uncle’s customs up to this date but: if I want to move that fence before I bury him, there wouldn’t be a soul to hinder me, he thought; no voice will be lifted.
“Bury him first and get it over with,” the loud stranger’s disagreeable voice said, and he got up and went to look for the shovel.
The pine box he had been sitting on was his uncle’s coffin but he didn’t intend to use it. The old man was too heavy for a thin boy to hoist over the side of a box, and though old Tarwater had built it himself a few years before, he had said that if it wasn’t feasible to get him into it when the time came, then just to put him in the hole as he was, only to be sure the hole was deep. He wanted it ten foot, he said, not just eight. He had worked on the box a long time, and when he finished it he had scratched on the top MASON TARWATER, WITH GOD, and had climbed into it where it stood on the back porch and had lain there for some time, nothing showing but his stomach which rose over the top like overleavened bread. The boy had stood at the side of the box, studying him. “This is the end of us all,” the old man said with satisfaction, his gravel voice hearty in the coffin.
“It’s too much of you for the box, ” Tarwater, aid. “I’ll have to sit on the lid or wait until you rot a little.”
“Don’t wait,” old Tarwater had said. “Listen. If it ain’t feasible to use the box when the time comes, if you can’t lift it or whatever, just get me in the hole, but I want it deep. I want it ten foot, not just eight-ten. You can roll me to it if nothing else. I’ll roll. Get two boards and set them down the steps and start me rolling and dig where I stop and don’t let me roll over into it until it’s deep enough. Prop me with some bricks so I won’t roll into it and don’t let the dogs nudge me over the edge before it’s finished. You better pen up the dogs,” he said.
“What if you die in bed?” the boy asked. “How’m I going to get you down the stairs?”
“I ain’t going to die in bed,” the old man said. “As soon as I hear the summons, I’m going to run downstairs. I’ll get as close to the door as I can. If I should get stuck up there, you’ll have to roll me down the stairs, that’s all.”
“My Lord,” the child said.
The old man sat up in the box and brought his fist down on the edge of it. “Listen,” he said. “I never asked much of you. I taken you and raised you and saved you from that ass in town and now all I’m asking in return is when I die to get me in the ground where the dead belong and set up a cross over me to show I’m there. That’s all in the world I’m asking you to do.”
“I’ll be doing good if I get you in the ground,” Tarwater said. “I’ll be too wore out set up any cross. I ain’t bothering with trifles.”
“Trifles!” his uncle hissed. “You’ll learn what a trifle is on the day those crosses are gathered! Burying the dead right may be the only honor you ever do yourself. I brought you out here to raise you a Christian,” he hollered, “and I’m damned if you won’t be one!”
“If I don’t have the strength to do it,” the child said, watching him with a careful detachment, “I’ll notify my uncle in town and he can come out and take care of you. The school teacher,” he drawled, observing that the pockmarks in his uncle’s face had already turned pale against the purple, “he’ll ‘tend to you.”
The threads that restrained the old man’s eyes thickened. He gripped both sides of the coffin and pushed forward as if he were going to drive it off the porch. “He’d burn me,” he said hoarsely. “He’d have me cremated in an oven and scatter my ashes. ‘Uncle,’ he said to me, ‘you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ He’d be willing to pay the undertaker to burn me to be able to scatter my ashes,” he said. “He don’t believe in the Resurrection. He don’t believe in the Last Day. He don’t believe in…”
“The dead don’t bother with particulars,” the boy interrupted.
The old man grabbed the front of his overalls and pulled him up against the side of the box so that their faces were not two inches apart. “The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are,” he said and then, as if he had conceived the answer for all insolence, he said, “There’s a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive!” and he released him with a laugh.
The boy had shown only by a slight quiver in the eyes that he was shaken by this, and after a minute he had said, ‘The school teacher is my uncle. The only blood connection I’ll have and a living man and if I wanted to go to him, I’d go, now.”
The old man looked at him silently for what seemed a full minute. Then he slammed his hands on the sides of the box and roared, “Whom the plague beckons, to the plague! Whom the sword, to the sword! Whom fire, to fire!” and the child trembled visibly.
A living man, he thought as he went to get the shovel, but he better not come out here and try to get me off this property because I’ll kill him. Go to him and be dammed, his uncle had said. I’ve saved you from him this far and if you go to him the minute I’m in the ground, there’s nothing I can do about it.
The shovel lay against the side of the hen house. “I’ll never set my foot in the city again,” Tarwater said. “I’ll never go to him. Him nor nobody else will ever get me off this place.” He decided to dig the grave under the fig tree because the old man would be good for the figs. The ground was sandy on top and solid brick underneath and the shovel made a clanging sound when he struck it in the sand. Two hundred pounds of dead mountain to bury, he thought, and stood with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, studying the white sky through the leaves of the tree. It would take all day to get a hole big enough out of this rock and the school teacher would burn him in a minute.
Tarwater had never seen the school teacher but he had seen his child, a boy who resembled old Tarwater himself. The old man had been so shocked by the likeness that the time he and Tarwater had gone there, he had only stood in the door, staring at the little boy and rolling his tongue around outside his mouth like an old idiot. That had been the first and only time the old man had seen the boy. “Three months there,” he would say. “It shames me. Betrayed for three months in the house of my own kin, and if when I’m dead you want to turn me over to my betrayer and see my body burned, go ahead. Go ahead, boy!” he had shouted, sitting up splotch-faced in his box. “Go ahead and let him burn me but watch out for the crab that begins to grip your neck after that!” and he had clawed his hand in the air to show Tarwater his grip. “I been leavened by the yeast he don’t believe in,” he said, “and I won’t be burned. And when I’m gone you’ll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in than you would be in the city with him!”
The white fog had eased through the yard and disappeared into the next bottom and now the air was clear and blank. “The dead are poor,” Tarwater said in the voice of the stranger. “You can’t be any poorer than dead. He’ll have to take what he gets.” Nobody to bother me, he thought. Ever. No hand uplifted to hinder me from anything. A sand-colored hound beat its tail on the ground nearby and a few black chickens scratched in the raw clay he was turning up. The sun had slipped over the blue line of trees and, circled by a haze of yellow, was moving slowly across the sky. “Now I can do anything I want to,” he said, softening the stranger’s voice so that he could stand it. Could kill off all those chickens if I had a mind to, he thought, watching the worthless black game bantams that his uncle had been fond of keeping.
“He favored a lot of foolishness,” the stranger said. “The truth is he was childish. Why, that school teacher never did him any harm. You take, all he did was to watch him and write down what he seen and heard and put it in a paper for school teachers to read. Now what was wrong in that? Why nothing. Who cares what a school teacher reads? And the old fool acted like he had been killed in his very soul. Well, he wasn’t so near dead then as he thought he was. Lived on fifteen years and raised up a boy to bury him, suitable to his own taste.”
As Tarwater slashed at the ground with the shovel, the stranger’s voice took on a kind of restrained fury and he kept repeating, “You got to bury him whole and completely by hand and that school teacher would burn him in a minute.” After he had dug for an hour or more, the grave was only a foot deep, not as deep yet as the corpse. He sat down on the edge of it for a while. The sun was like a furious white blister in the sky. “The dead are a heap more trouble than the living,” the stranger said. “That school teacher wouldn’t consider for a minute that on the last day all the bodies marked by crosses will be gathered. In the rest of the world they do things different than what you been taught.”
“I been there oncet,” Tarwater muttered. “Nobody has to tell me.”
His uncle two or three years before had gone there to call on the lawyers to try and get the property unentailed so that it would skip the school teacher and go to Tarwater. Tarwater had sat at the lawyer’s twelfth-story window and looked down into the pit of the city street while his uncle transacted the business. On the way from the railroad station he had walked tall in the mass of moving metal and concrete speckled with the very small eyes of people. The glitter of his own eyes was shaded under the stiff rootlike brim of a new gray hat balanced perfectly straight on his buttressing ears. Before coming he had read facts in the almanac and he knew that there were 60,000 people here who were seeing him for the first time. He wanted to stop and shake hands with each of them and say his name was Francis M. Tarwater and that he was here only for the day to accompany his uncle on business at a lawyer’s. His head jerked backwards after each passing figure until they began to pass too thickly and he observed that their eyes didn’t grab at you like the eyes of country people. Several of them bumped into him and this contact that should have made an acquaintance for life made nothing because the hulks shoved on with ducked heads and muttered apologies that he would have accepted if they had waited. At the lawyer’s window, he had knelt down and let his face hang out upsidedown over the floating speckled street moving like a river of tin below and had watched the glints on it from the sun which drifted pale in a pale sky. You have to do something particular here to make them look at you, he thought. They ain’t going to look at you just because God made you. When I come for good, he said to himself, I’ll do something to make every eye stick on me for what I clone; and leaning forward, he saw his hat drop down gently, lost and casual, dallied slightly by the breeze on its way to be smashed in the traffic below. He clutched at his bare head and fell back inside the room.
His uncle was in argument with the lawyer, hath hitting the desk that separated them, bending their knees and hitting their fists at the same time. The lawyer, a tall dome-headed man with an eagle’s nose, kept repeating in a restrained shriek, “But I didn’t make the will. I didn’t make the law,” and his uncle’s voice grated, “I can’t help it. My daddy wouldn’t have wanted it this way. It has to skip him. My daddy wouldn’t have seen a fool inherit his property. That’s not how he intended it.”
“My hat is gone,” Tarwater said.
The lawyer threw himself backwards into his chair and screaked it toward Tarwater and saw him without interest from pale-blue eyes and screaked it forward again and said to his uncle, “There’s nothing I can do. You’re wasting your time and mine. You might as well resign yourself to this will.”
“Listen,” old Tarwater said, “at one time I thought I was finished, old and sick and about to die and no money, nothing, and I accepted his hospitality because he was my closest blood connection and you could have called it his duty to take me, only I thought it was Charity, I thought…”
“I can’t help what you thought or did or what your connection thought or did,” the lawyer said and closed his eyes.
“My hat fell,” Tarwater said.
“I’m only a lawyer,” the lawyer said, letting his glance rove over the lines of clay-colored books of law that fortressed his office.
“A car is liable to have run over it by now.”
“Listen,” his uncle said, “all the time he was studying me for a paper he was writing. Only had me there to study me for this paper. Taking secret tests on me, his own kin, looking into my soul like a Peeping Tom, and then says to me, ‘Uncle, you’re a type that’s almost extinct!’ Almost extinct!” the old man piped, barely able to force a thread of sound from his throat. “You see how extinct I am!”
The lawyer shut his eyes and smiled into one cheek.
“Other lawyers,” the old man growled, and they had left and visited three more without stopping, and Tarwater had counted eleven men who might have had on his hat or might not. Finally when they came out of the fourth lawyer’s office, they sat down on the window ledge of a bank building and his uncle felt in his pocket for some biscuits he had brought and handed one to Tarwater. The old man unbuttoned his coat and allowed his stomach to ease forward and rest on his lap while he ate. His face worked wrathfully; the skin between the pockmarks grew pink and then purple and then white and the pockmarks appeared to jump from one spot to another. Tarwater was very pale and his eyes glittered with a peculiar hollow depth. He had an old work handkerchief tied around his head, knotted at the four corners. He didn’t observe the passing people who observed him now. “Thank God, we’re finished here and can go home,” he muttered.
“We ain’t finished here,” the old man said and got up abruptly and started down the street.
“My Jesus,” the boy hissed, jumping to catch up with him. “Can’t we sit down for one minute? Ain’t you got any sense? They all tell you the same thing. It’s only one law and it’s nothing you can do about it. I got sense enough to get that; why ain’t you? What’s the matter with you?”
The old man strode on with his head thrust forward as if he were smelling out an enemy.
“Where we going?” Tarwater asked after they had walked out of the business streets and were passing between rows of gray bulbous houses with sooty porches that overhung the sidewalks. “Listen,” he said, hitting his uncle’s hip, “I never ast to come.”
“You would have asked to come soon enough,” the old man muttered. “Get your fill now.”
“I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I’m here before I knew this here was here.”
“Just remember,” the old man said, “just remember that I told you to remember when you ast to come that you never liked it when you were here,” and they kept on going, crossing one length of sidewalk after another, row after row of overhanging houses with halfopen doors that let a little dried light fall on the stained passageways inside. Finally they came out into another section where the houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak. After a few blocks, Tarwater dropped down on the sidewalk and said, “I ain’t going a step further.”
“I don’t even know where I’m going and I ain’t going no further!” he shouted at his uncle’s heavy figure which didn’t stop or look back. In a second he jumped up and followed him again, thinking: If anything happened to him, I would be lost here.
The old man kept straining forward as if his blood scent were leading him closer and closer to the place where his enemy was hiding. He suddenly turned up the short walk of a pale-yellow house and moved rigidly to the white door, his heavy shoulders hunched as if he were going to crash through like a bulldozer. He struck the wood with his fist, ignoring a polished brass knocker. By the time Tarwater came up behind him, the door had opened and a small pink-faced fat boy stood in it. He was a white-haired child and wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had pale-silver eyes like the old man’s. The two stood staring at each other, old Tarwater with his fist raised and his mouth open and his tongue lolling idiotically from side to side. For a second the little fat boy seemed shocked still with astonishment. Then he guffawed. He raised his fist and opened his mouth and let his tongue roll out as far as it would go. The old man’s eyes seemed about to strain out of their sockets.
“Tell your father,” he roared, “that I’m not extinct!”
The little boy shook as if a blast had hit him and pushed the door almost shut, hiding himself all but one spectacled eye. The old man grabbed Tarwater by the shoulder and swung him around and pushed him down the path away from the place.
He had never been back there again, never seen his cousin again, never seen the school teacher at all, and he hoped to God, he told the stranger digging the grave along with him now, that he would never see him, though he had nothing against him and he would dislike to kill him, but if he came out here, messing with what was none of his business except by law, then he would be obliged to.
“Listen,” the stranger said, “what would he want to come out here for—where there’s nothing?”
Tarwater began to dig again and didn’t answer. He didn’t search out the stranger’s face, but he knew by now it was sharp and friendly and wise, shadowed under a stiff broad-brimmed hat. He had lost his dislike for the sound of the voice. Only, every now and then it sounded like a stranger’s voice to him. He began to feel that he was only just now meeting himself, as if, as long as his uncle had lived, he had been deprived of his own acquaintance.
“I ain’t denying the old man was a good one,” his new friend said, “but like you said: you can’t be an y poorer than dead. They have to take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his body is not going to feel the pinch of fire or anything else.”
“It was the last day he was thinking of,” Tarwater said.
“Well now,” the stranger said, “don’t you think any cross you set up in the year 1954 or 5 or 6 would be rotted out by the year the Day of Judgment comes in? Rotted to as much dust as his ashes if you reduced him to ashes? And lemme ast you this: what’s God going to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et and the fish that et them et by other fish and they et by yet others? And what about people that get burned up naturally in house fires? Burnt up one way or another or lost in machines until they’re a pulp? And all these sojers blasted to nothing? What about all these naturally left without a piece to fit a piece?”
“If I burnt him,” Tarwater said, “it wouldn’t be natural, it would be deliberate.”
“Oh, I see,” the stranger said. “It ain’t the Day of Judgment for him you’re worried about, it’s the Day of Judgement for you.”
“That’s my bidnis,” Tarwater said.
“I ain’t buttin into your bidnis,” the stranger said. “It don’t mean a thing to me. You’re left by yourself in this empty place. Forever by yourself in the empty place with just as much light as that dwarf sun wants to let in. You don’t mean a thing to a soul as far as I can see.”
“Redeemed,” Tarwater muttered.
“Do you smoke?” the stranger asked.
“Smoke if I want to and don’t if I don’t,” Tarwater said. “Bury if need be and don’t if don’t.”
“Go take a look at him and see if he’s fell off his chair,” his friend suggested.
Tarwater let the shovel drop in the grave and returned to the house. He opened the front door a crack and put his face to it. His uncle glared slightly to the side of him, like a judge intent upon some terrible evidence. The child shut the door quickly and went back to the grave. He was cold in spite of the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back.
The sun was directly overhead, apparently dead still, holding its breath waiting out the noontime. The grave was about two feet deep. “Ten foot now, remember,” the stranger said and laughed. “Old men are selfish. You got to expect the least from them. The least from everybody,” he added, and let out a flat sigh that was like a gust of sand raised and dropped suddenly by the wind.
Tarwater looked up and saw two figures cutting across the field, a colored man and woman, each dangling an empty vinegar jug by a finger. The woman, tall and Indian-like, had on a green sunhat. She stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled, burnt-rag face, darker than his hat. “Old man passed,” he said.
The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail, piercing and formal. She set her jug down on the’ ground and crossed her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.
“Tell her to shut up that,” Tarwater said, “I’m in charge here now and I don’t want no nigger-mourning.”
“I seen his spirit for two nights,” she said, “Seen him two nights and he was unrested.”
“He ain’t been dead hut since this morning,’ Tarwater said. “If you all want your jugs filled, give them to me and dig while I’m gone.”
“He’d been perdicting his passing for many years,” Buford said. “She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn’t rested. I known him well. I known him very well indeed.”
“Poor sweet sugar boy,” the woman said to Tarwater, “what you going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?”
“Mind by bidnis,” the boy growled, jerking the jug out of her hand, and started off so quick lv that he almost fell. He stalked across the back field toward the rim of trees that surrounded the clearmg.
The birds had gone into the deep woods to escape the noon sun and one thrush, hidden some distance ahead of him, called the same four notes again and again, stopping each time after them to make a silence. Tarwater began to waslk faster, then he began to lope, and in a second he was running like something hunted, sliding down slopes waxed with pine needles and grasping the limbs of trees to pull himself, panting, up the slippery inclines. He crashed through a wall of honeysuckle and leapt across a sandy stream bed that was almost dry now and fell down against the high clay bank that formed the back wall of a cove where the old man had kept his extra liquor hidden. He hid it in a hollow of the balk, covered with a large stone. Tarwater began to fight at the stone to pull it away, while the stranger stood over his shoulder, panting, “He was crazy! He was crazy! That’s the long and short of it. He was crazy!” Tarwater got the stone away and pulled out a black jug and sat down against the bank with it. “Crazy!” the stranger hissed, collapsing by his side. The sun appeared, edging its way secretly behind the tops of the trees that rose over the hiding place.
“A man, seventy years of age, to bring a baby out into the backwoods to raise him right! Suppose he had died when you were four years old? Could you have toted mash to the still then and supported yourself? I never heard of no four-year-old running a still.
“Never did I hear of that,” he continued. “You weren’t anything to him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when the time came, and now that he’s dead, he’s shut of you but you got two hundred pounds of him to carry below the face of the earth. And don’t think he wouldn’t heat up like a coal stove to see you take a drop of liquor,” he added. “He might say it would hurt you but what he would mean was you might get so much you wouldn’t be in no fit condition to bury him. He said he brought you out here to raise you according to principle and that was the principle: that you should be fit when the time came to bury him so he would have a cross to mark where he was at.
“Well,” he said in a softer tone, when the boy had taken a long swallow from the black jug, “a little won’t interfere. Moderation never hurt no one.”
A burning arm slid down Tarwater’s throat as if the devil were already reaching inside him to finger his soul. He squinted at the angry sun creeping behind the topmost fringe of the trees.
“Take it easy,” his friend said. “Do you remember them nigger gospel singers you saw one time, all drunk, all singing, all dancing around that black Ford automobile? Jesus, they wouldn’t have been near so glad they were redeemed if they hadn’t had that liquor in them. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to my Redemption if I was you,” he said. “Some people take everything too hard.”
Tarwater drank more slowly. He had been drunk only one time before and that time his uncle had beat him with a board for it, saying liquor would dissolve a child’s gut; another of his lies because his gut had not dissolved.
“It should be clear to you,” his kind friend said, “how all your life you been tricked by that old man. You could have been a city slicker for the last ten years. Instead, you been deprived of any company but his, you been living in a two-story barn in the middle of this earth’s bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is true to the fact? Maybe he taught you a system of figures nobody else uses? How do you know that two added to two makes four? Four added to four makes eight? Maybe other people don’t use that system. How do you know if there was an Adam or if Jesus eased your situation any when He redeemed you? Or how you know if He actually done it? Nothing but that old man’s word and it ought to be obvious to you by now that he was crazy. And as for Judgment Day,” the stranger said, “every day is Judgment Day.
“Ain’t you old enough to have learnt that yet for yourself? Don’t everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out right or wrong before your eye and usually before the sun has set? Have you ever got by with anything) No you ain’t nor ever thought you would,” he said. “You might as well drink all that liquor since you’ve already drunk so much. Once you pass the moderation mark you’ve passed it, and that gyration you feel working down from the top of your brain,” he said, “that’s the Hand of God laying a blessing on you. He has given you your release. That old man was the stone before your door and the Lord has rolled it away. He ain’t rolled it quite far enough yet, of course. You got to finish up yourself but He’s done the main part. Praise Him.”
Tarwater had ceased to have any feeling in his legs. He dozed for a while, his head hanging to the side and his mouth open and the liquor trickling slowly down the side of his overalls where the jug had overturned in his lap. Eventually there was just a drip at the neck of the bottle, forming and filling and dropping, silent and measured and sun-colored. The bright, even sky began to fade, coarsening with clouds until every shadow had gone in. He woke with a wrench forward, his eyes focusing and unfocusing on something that looked like burnt rag hanging close to his face.
Buford said, “This ain’t no way for you to act. Old man don’t deserve this. There’s no rest until the dead is buried.” He was squatting on his heels, one hand gripped around Tarwater’s arm. “I gone yonder to the door and seen him sitting there at the table, not even laid out on a cooling board. He ought to be laid out and have some salt on his bosom if you mean to keep him overnight.”
The boy’s lids pinched together to hold the image steady and in a second he made out the two small red blistered eyes. “He deserves to lie in a grave that fits him,” Buford said. “He was deep in this life, he was deep in Jesus’ misery.”
“Nigger,” the child said, working his strange swollen tongue, “take your hand off me.”
Buford lifted his hand. “He needs to be rested,” he said.
“He’ll be rested all right when I get through with him,” Tarwater said vaguely. “Go on and lea’ me to my bidnis.”
“Nobody going to bother you,” Buford said, standing up. He waited a minute, bent, looking down at the limp figure sprawled against the bank. The boy’s head was tilted backwards over a root that jutted out of the clay wall. His mouth hung open, and his hat, turned up in front, cut a straight line across his forehead, just over his halfopen eyes. His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them held an ancient look as if the child’s skeleton beneath were as old as the world. “Nobody going to bother you,” the Negro muttered, pushing through the wall of honeysuckle without looking back. “That going to be your trouble.”
Tarwater closed his eyes again.
Some night bird complaining close by woke him up. It was not a screeching noise, only an intermittent hump-hump as if the bird had to recall his grievance each time before he repeated it. Clouds were moving convulsively across a black sky and there was a pink unsteady moon that appeared to be jerked up a foot or so and then dropped and jerked up again. This was because as he observed in an instant, the sky was lowering, coming down fast to smother him. The bird screeched and flew off in time and Tarwater lurched into the middle of the stream bed and crouched on his hands and knees. The moon was reflected like pale fire in the few spots of water in the sand. He sprang at the wall of honeysuckle and began to tear through it, confusing the sweet familiar odor with the weight coming down on him. When he stood up on the other side, the black ground swung slowly and threw him down again. A flare of pink lightning lit the woods and he saw the black shapes of trees pierce out of the ground all around him. The night bird began to hump again from a thicket where he had settled.
Tarwater got up and started moving in the direction of the clearing, feeling his way from tree to tree, the trunks very cold and dry to his touch. There was distant thunder and a continuous flicker of pale lightning firing one section of woods and then another. Finally he saw the shack, standing gaunt-black and tall in the middle of the clearing, with the pink moon trembling directly over it. His eyes glittered like open pits of light as he moved across the sand, dragging his crushed shadow behind him. He didn’t turn his head to that side of the yard where he had started the grave.
He stopped at the far back corner of the house and squatted down on the ground and looked underneath at the litter there, chicken crates and barrels and old rags and boxes. He had four matches in his pocket. He crawled under and began to set small fires, building one from another and working his way out at the front porch, leaving the fire behind him eating greedily at the dry tinder and the floor boards of the house. He crossed the front side of the clearing and went under the barbed-wire fence and through the rutted field without looking back until he reached the edge of the opposite woods. Then he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the pink moon had dropped through the roof of the shack and was bursting and he began to run, forced on through the woods by two bulging silver eyes that grew in immense astonishment in the center of the fire behind him.
Toward midnight he came out on the highway and caught a ride with a salesman who was a manufacturer’s representative selling copper flues throughout the Southeast and who gave the silent boy what he said was the best advice he could give any young fellow setting out to find himself a place in the world. While they sped forward on the black untwisting highway watched on either side by a dark wall of trees, the salesman said that it had been his personal experience that you couldn’t sell a copper flue to a man you didn’t love. He was a thin fellow with a narrow gorgelike face that appeared to have been worn down to the sharpest possible depressions. He wore a broad-brimmed stiff gray hat of the kind used by business men who would like to look like cowboys. He said love was the only policy that worked ninety-five per cent of the time. He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man’s wife’s health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customer’s families in and what was wrong with them. A man’s wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man’s hardware store until she died; then he scratched her name out and wrote dead there “And I say thank God when they’re dead,” the salesman said, “that’s one less to remember.”
“You don’t owe the dead anything,’ Tarwater said in a loud voice, speaking for almost the first time since he had got in the car.
“Nor they you,” said the stranger. “And that’s the way it ought to be in this world—nobody owing nobody nothing.”
“Look,” Tarwater said suddenly, sitting forward, his face close to the windshield, “we’re headed in the wrong direction. We’re going back where we came from. There’s the fire again. There’s the fire we left.” Ahead of them in the sky there was a faint glow, steady and not made by lightning. “That’s the same fire we come from!” the boy said in a high wild voice.
“Boy, you must be nuts,” the salesman said. “That’s the city we’re coming to. That’s the glow from the city lights. I reckon this is your first trip anywhere.”
“You’re turned around,” the child said. “It’s the same fire.”
The stranger twisted his rutted face sharply. “I’ve never been turned around in my life,” he said. “And I didn’t come from any fire. I come from Mobile. And I know where I’m going. What’s the matter with you?”
Tarwater sat staring at the glow in front of him. “I was asleep,” he muttered. “I’m just now waking up.”
“Well you should have been listening to me,” the salesman said. “I been telling you things you ought to know.”
Greenleaf (1956)
MRS. MAY’S bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened?—like some patient god come down to woo her—for a stir inside the room. The window was dark and the sound of her breathing too light to be carried outside. Clouds crossing the moon blackened him and in the dark he began to tear at the hedge. Presently they passed and he appeared again in the same spot, chewing steadily, with a hedge-wreath that he had ripped loose for himself caught in the tips of his horns. When the moon drifted into retirement again, there was nothing to mark his place but the sound of steady chewing. Then abruptly a pink glow filled the window. Bars of light slid across him as the venetian blind was slit. He took a step backward and lowered his head as if to show the wreath across his horns.
For almost a minute there was no sound from inside, then as he raised his crowned head again, a woman’s voice, guttural as if addressed to a dog, said, “Get away from here, Sir!” and in a second muttered, “Some nigger’s scrub bull.”
The animal pawed the ground and Mrs. May, standing bent forward behind the blind, closed it quickly lest the light make him charge into the shrubbery. For a second she waited, still bent forward, her nightgown hanging loosely from her narrow shoulders. Green rubber curlers sprouted neatly over her forehead and her face beneath them was smooth as concrete with an egg-white paste that drew the wrinkles out while she slept.
She had been conscious in her sleep of a steady rhythmic chewing as if something were eating one wall of the house. She had been aware that whatever it was had been eating as long as she had had the place and had eaten everything from the beginning of her fence line up to the house and now was eating the house and calmly with the same steady rhythm would continue through the house, eating her and the boys, and then on, eating everything but the Greenleafs, on and on, eating everything until nothing was left but the Greenleafs on a little island all their own in the middle of what had been her place. When the munching reached her elbow, she jumped up and found herself, fully awake, standing in the middle of her room. She identified the sound at once: a cow was tearing at the shrubbery under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had left the lane gate open and she didn’t doubt that the entire herd was on her lawn. She turned on the dim pink table lamp and then went to the window and slit the blind. The bull, gaunt and long-legged, was standing about four feet from her, chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor.
For fifteen years, she thought as she squinted at him fiercely, she had been having shiftless people’s hogs root up her oats, their mules wallow on her lawn, their scrub bulls breed her cows. If this one was not put up now, he would be over the fence, ruining her herd before morning—and Mr. Greenleaf was soundly sleeping a half mile down the road in the tenant house. There was no way to get him unless she dressed and got in her car and rode down there and woke him up. He would come but his expression, his whole figure, his every pause, would say: “Hit looks to me like one or both of them boys would not make their maw ride out in the middle of the night thisaway. If hit was my boys, they would have got thet bull up theirself.”
The bull lowered his head and shook it and the wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown. She had closed the blind then; in a few seconds she heard him move off heavily.
Mr. Greenleaf would say, “If hit was my boys they would never have allowed their maw to go after hired help in the middle of the night. They would have did it theirself.”
Weighing it, she decided not to bother Mr. Greenleaf. She returned to bed thinking that if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one else would have him. She had had Mr. Greenleaf fifteen years but no one else would have had him five minutes. Just the way he approached an object was enough to tell anybody with eyes what kind of a worker he was. He walked with a high-shouldered creep and he never appeared to come directly forward. He walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him. She had not fired him because she had always doubted she could do better. He was too shiftless to go out and look for another job; he didn’t have the initiative to steal, and after she had told him three or four times to do a thing, he did it; but he never told her about a sick cow until it was too late to call the veterinarian and if her barn had caught on fire, he would have called his wife to see the flames before he began to put them out. And of the wife, she didn’t even like to think. Beside the wife, Mr. Greenleaf was an aristocrat.
“If it had been my boys,” he would have said, “they would have cut off their right arm before they would have allowed their maw to…”
“If your boys had any pride, Mr. Greenleaf,” she would like to say to him some day, “there are many things that they would not allow their mother to do.”
The next morning as soon as Mr. Greenleaf came to the back door, she told him there was a stray bull on the place and that she wanted him penned up at once.
“Done already been here three days,” he said, addressing his right foot which he held forward, turned slightly as if he were trying to look at the sole. He was standing at the bottom of the three back steps while she leaned out the kitchen door, a small woman with pale near-sighted eyes and grey hair that rose on top like the crest of some disturbed bird.
“Three days!” she said in the restrained screech that had become habitual with her.
Mr. Greenleaf, looking into the distance over the near pasture, removed a package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and let one fall into his hand. He put the package back and stood for a while looking at the cigarette. “I put him in the bull pen but he torn out of there,” he said presently. “I didn’t see him none after that.” He bent over the cigarette and lit it and then turned his head briefly in her direction. The upper part of his face sloped gradually into the lower which was long and narrow, shaped like a rough chalice. He had deep-set fox-colored eyes shadowed under a grey felt hat that he wore slanted forward following the line of his nose. His build was insignificant.
“Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, “get that bull up this morning before you do anything else. You know he’ll ruin the breeding schedule. Get him up and keep him up and the next time there’s a stray bull on this place, tell me at once. Do you understand?”
“Where you want him put at?” Mr. Greenleaf asked.
“I don’t care where you put him,” she said. “You are supposed to have some sense. Put him where he can’t get out. Whose bull is he?”
For a moment Mr. Greenleaf seemed to hesitate between silence and speech. He studied the air to the left of him. “He must be somebody’s bull,” he said after a while.
“Yes, he must!” she said and shut the door with a precise little slam.
She went into the dining room where the two boys were eating breakfast and sat down on the edge of her chair at the head of the table. She never ate breakfast but she sat with them to see that they had what they wanted. “Honestly!” she said, and began to tell about the bull, aping Mr. Greenleaf saying, “It must be somebody’s bull.”
Wesley continued to read the newspaper folded beside his plate but Scofield interrupted his eating from time to time to look at her and laugh. The two boys never had the same reaction to anything. They were as different, she said, as night and day. The only thing they did have in common was that neither of them cared what happened on the place. Scofield was a business type and Wesley was an intellectual.
Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought that this was what had caused him to be an intellectual. Scofield, who had never had a day’s sickness in his life, was an insurance salesman. She would not have minded his selling insurance if he had sold a nicer kind but he sold the kind that only Negroes buy. He was what Negroes call a “policy man.” He said there was more money in nigger-insurance than any other kind, and before company, he was very loud about it. He would shout, “Mamma don’t like to hear me say it but I’m the best nigger-insurance salesman in this county!”
Scofield was thirty-six and he had a broad pleasant smiling face but he was not married. “Yes,” Mrs. May would say, “and if you sold decent insurance, some nice girl would be willing to marry you. What nice girl wants to marry a nigger-insurance man? You’ll wake up some day and it’ll be too late.”
And at this Scofield would yodel and say, “Why Mamma, I’m not going to marry until you’re dead and gone and then I’m going to marry me some nice fat farm girl that can take over this place!” And once he had added,”—some nice lady like Mrs. Greenleaf.” When he had said this, Mrs. May had risen from her chair, her back stiff as a rake handle, and had gone to her room. There she had sat down on the edge of her bed for some time with her small face drawn. Finally she had whispered, “I work and slave, I struggle and sweat to keep this place for them and soon as I’m dead, they’ll marry trash and bring it in here and ruin everything. They’ll marry trash and ruin everything I’ve done,” and she had made up her mind at that moment to change her will. The next day she had gone to her lawyer and had had the property entailed so that if they married, they could not leave it to their wives.
The idea that one of them might marry a woman even remotely like Mrs. Greenleaf was enough to make her ill. She had put up with Mr. Greenleaf for fifteen years, but the only way she had endured his wife had been by keeping entirely out of her sight. Mrs. Greenleaf was large and loose. The yard around her house looked like a dump and her five girls were always filthy; even the youngest one dipped snuff. Instead of making a garden or washing their clothes, her preoccupation was what she called “prayer healing.”
Every day she cut all the morbid stories out of the newspaper—the accounts of women who had been raped and criminals who had escaped and children who had been burned and of train wrecks and plane crashes and the divorces of movie stars. She took these to the woods and dug a hole and buried them and then she fell on the ground over them and mumbled and groaned for an hour or so, moving her huge arms back and forth under her and out again and finally just lying down flat and, Mrs. May suspected, going to sleep in the dirt.
She had not found out about this until the Greenleafs had been with her a few months. One morning she had been out to inspect a field that she had wanted planted in rye but that had come up in clover because Mr. Greenleaf had used the wrong seeds in the grain drill. She was returning through a wooded path that separated two pastures, muttering to herself and hitting the ground methodically with a long stick she carried in case she saw a snake. “Mr. Greenleaf,” she was saying in a low voice, “I cannot afford to pay for your mistakes. I am a poor woman and this place is all I have. I have two boys to educate. I cannot…”
Out of nowhere a guttural agonized voice groaned, “Jesus! Jesus!” In a second it came again with a terrible urgency. “Jesus! Jesus!”
Mrs. May stopped still, one hand lifted to her throat. The sound was so piercing that she felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her. Her second thought was more reasonable: somebody had been hurt on the place and would sue her for everything she had. She had no insurance. She rushed forward and turning a bend in the path, she saw Mrs. Greenleaf sprawled on her hands and knees off the side of the road, her head down.
“Mrs. Greenleaf!” she shrilled, “what’s happened?”
Mrs. Greenleaf raised her head. Her face was a patchwork of dirt and tears and her small eyes, the color of two field peas, were red-rimmed and swollen, but her expression was as composed as a bulldog’s. She swayed back and forth on her hands and knees and groaned. “Jesus, Jesus.”
Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true. “What is the matter with you?” she asked sharply.
“You broken my healing,” Mrs. Greenleaf said, waving her aside. “I can’t talk to you until I finish.”
Mrs. May stood, bent forward, her mouth open and her stick raised off the ground as if she were not sure what she wanted to strike with it
“Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!” Mrs. Greenleaf shrieked. “Jesus, stab me in the heart!” and she fell back flat in the dirt, a huge human mound, her legs and arms spread out as if she were trying to wrap them around the earth.
Mrs. May felt as furious and helpless as if she had been insulted by a child. “Jesus,” she said, drawing herself back, “would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash your children’s clothes!” and she had turned and walked off as fast as she could.
Whenever she thought of how the Greenleaf boys had advanced in the world, she had only to think of Mrs. Greenleaf sprawled obscenely on the ground, and say to herself, “Well, no matter how far they go, they came from that.”
She would like to have been able to put in her will that when she died, Wesley and Scofield were not to continue to employ Mr. Greenleaf. She was capable of handling Mr. Greenleaf; they were not. Mr. Greenleaf had pointed out to her once that her boys didn’t know hay from silage. She had pointed out to him that they had other talents, that Scofield was a successful business man and Wesley a successful intellectual. Mr. Greenleaf did not comment, but he never lost an opportunity of letting her see, by his expression or some simple gesture, that he held the two of them in infinite contempt. As scrub-human as the Greenleafs were, he never hesitated to let her know that in any like circumstance in which his own boys might have been involved, they—O. T. and E. T. Greenleaf—would have acted to better advantage.
The Greenleaf boys were two or three years younger than the May boys. They were twins and you never knew when you spoke to one of them whether you were speaking to O. T. or E. T., and they never had the politeness to enlighten you. They were long-legged and raw-boned and red-skinned, with bright grasping fox-colored eyes like their father’s. Mr. Greenleaf’s pride in them began with the fact that they were twins. He acted, Mrs. May said, as if this were something smart they had thought of themselves. They were energetic and hard-working and she would admit to anyone that they had come a long way—and that the Second World War was responsible for it.
They had both joined the service and, disguised in their uniforms, they could not be told from other people’s children. You could tell, of course, when they opened their mouths but they did that seldom. The smartest thing they had done was to get sent overseas and there to marry French wives. They hadn’t married French trash either. They had married nice girls who naturally couldn’t tell that they murdered the king’s English or that the Greenleafs were who they were.
Wesley’s heart condition had not permitted him to serve his country but Scofield had been in the army for two years. He had not cared for it and at the end of his military service, he was only a Private First Class. The Greenleaf boys were both some kind of sergeants, and Mr. Greenleaf, in those days, had never lost an opportunity of referring to them by their rank. They had both managed to get wounded and now they both had pensions. Further, as soon as they were released from the army, they took advantage of all the benefits and went to the school of agriculture at the university—the taxpayers meanwhile supporting their French wives. The two of them were living now about two miles down the highway on a piece of land that the government had helped them to buy and in a brick duplex bungalow that the government had helped to build and pay for. If the war had made anyone, Mrs. May said, it had made the Greenleaf boys. They each had three little children apiece, who spoke Greenleaf English and French, and who, on account of their mothers’ background, would be sent to the convent school and brought up with manners. “And in twenty years,” Mrs. May asked Scofield and Wesley, “do you know what those people will be?
“Society,” she said blackly.
She had spent fifteen years coping with Mr. Greenleaf and, by now, handling him had become second nature with her. His disposition on any particular day was as much a factor in what she could and couldn’t do as the weather was, and she had learned to read his face the way real country people read the sunrise and sunset.
She was a country woman only by persuasion. The late Mr. May, a business man, had bought the place when land was down, and when he died it was all he had to leave her. The boys had not been happy to move to the country to a broken-down farm, but there was nothing else for her to do. She had the timber on the place cut and with the proceeds had set herself up in the dairy business after Mr. Greenleaf had answered her ad. “i seen yor add and i will come have 2 boys,” was all his letter said, but he arrived the next day in a pieced-together truck, his wife and five daughters sitting on the floor in back, himself and the two boys in the cab.
Over the years they had been on her place, Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf had aged hardly at all. They had no worries, no responsibilities. They lived like the lilies of the field, off the fat that she struggled to put into the land. When she was dead and gone from overwork and worry, the Greenleafs, healthy and thriving, would be just ready to begin draining Scofield and Wesley.
Wesley said the reason Mrs. Greenleaf had not aged was because she released all her emotions in prayer healing. “You ought to start praying, Sweetheart,” he had said in the voice that, poor boy, he could not help making deliberately nasty.
Scofield only exasperated her beyond endurance but Wesley caused her real anxiety. He was thin and nervous and bald and being an intellectual was a terrible strain on his disposition. She doubted if he would marry until she died but she was certain that then the wrong woman would get him. Nice girls didn’t like Scofield but Wesley didn’t like nice girls. He didn’t like anything. He drove twenty miles every day to the university where he taught and twenty miles back every night, but he said he hated the twenty-mile drive and he hated the second-rate university and he hated the morons who attended it. He hated the country and he hated the life he lived; he hated living with his mother and his idiot brother and he hated hearing about the damn dairy and the damn help and the damn broken machinery. But in spite of all he said, he never made any move to leave. He talked about Paris and Rome but he never went even to Atlanta.
“You’d go to those places and you’d get sick,” Mrs. May would say. “Who in Paris is going to see that you get a salt-free diet? And do you think if you married one of those odd numbers you take out that she would cook a salt-free diet for you? No indeed, she would not!” When she took this line, Wesley would turn himself roughly around in his chair and ignore her. Once when she had kept it up too long, he had snarled, “Well, why don’t you do something practical, Woman? Why don’t you pray for me like Mrs. Greenleaf would?”
“I don’t like to hear you boys make jokes about religion,” she had said. “If you would go to church, you would meet some nice girls.”
But it was impossible to tell them anything. When she looked at the two of them now, sitting on either side of the table, neither one caring the least if a stray bull ruined her herd—which was their herd, their future—when she looked at the two of them, one hunched over a paper and the other teetering back in his chair, grinning at her like an idiot, she wanted to jump up and beat her fist on the table and shout, “You’ll find out one of these days, you’ll find out what Reality is when it’s too late!”
“Mamma,” Scofield said, “don’t you get excited now but I’ll tell you whose bull that is.” He was looking at her wickedly. He let his chair drop forward and he got up. Then with his shoulders bent and his hands held up to cover his head, he tiptoed to the door. He backed into the hall and pulled the door almost to so that it hid all of him but his face. “You want to know, Sugarpie?” he asked.
Mrs. May sat looking at him coldly.
“That’s O. T. and E. T.’s bull,” he said. “I collected from their nigger yesterday and he told me they were missing it,” and he showed her an exaggerated expanse of teeth and disappeared silently.
Wesley looked up and laughed.
Mrs. May turned her head forward again, her expression unaltered. “I am the only adult on this place,” she said. She leaned across the table and pulled the paper from the side of his plate. “Do you see how it’s going to be when I die and you boys have to handle him?” she began. “Do you see why he didn’t know whose bull that was? Because it was theirs. Do you see what I have to put up with? Do you see that if I hadn’t kept my foot on his neck all these years, you boys might be milking cows every morning at four o’clock?”
Wesley pulled the paper back toward his plate and staring at her full in the face, he murmured, “I wouldn’t milk a cow to save your soul from hell.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” she said in a brittle voice. She sat back and began rapidly turning her knife over at the side of her plate. “O. T. and E. T. are fine boys,” she said. “They ought to have been my sons.” The thought of this was so horrible that her vision of Wesley was blurred at once by a wall of tears. All she saw was his dark shape, rising quickly from the table. “And you two,” she cried, “you two should have belonged to that woman!”
He was heading for the door.
“When I die,” she said in a thin voice, “I don’t know what’s going to become of you.”
“You’re always yapping about when-you-die,” he growled as he rushed out, “but you look pretty healthy to me.”
For some time she sat where she was, looking straight ahead through the window across the room into a scene of indistinct greys and greens. She stretched her face and her neck muscles and drew in a long breath but the scene in front of her flowed together anyway into a watery grey mass. “They needn’t think I’m going to die any time soon,” she muttered, and some more defiant voice in her added: I’ll die when I get good and ready.
She wiped her eyes with the table napkin and got up and went to the window and gazed at the scene in front of her. The cows were grazing on two pale green pastures across the road and behind them, fencing them in, was a black wall of trees with a sharp sawtooth edge that held off the indifferent sky. The pastures were enough to calm her. When she looked out any window in her house, she saw the reflection of her own character. Her city friends said she was the most remarkable woman they knew, to go, practically penniless and with no experience, out to a rundown farm and make a success of it. “Everything is against you,” she would say, “the weather is against you and the dirt is against you and the help is against you. They’re all in league against you. There’s nothing for it but an iron hand!”
“Look at Mamma’s iron hand!” Scofield would yell and grab her arm and hold it up so that her delicate blue-veined little hand would dangle from her wrist like the head of a broken lily. The company always laughed.
The sun, moving over the black and white grazing cows, was just a little brighter than the rest of the sky. Looking down, she saw a darker shape that might have been its shadow cast at an angle, moving among them. She uttered a sharp cry and turned and marched out of the house.
Mr. Greenleaf was in the trench silo, filling a wheelbarrow. She stood on the edge and looked down at him. “I told you to get up that bull. Now he’s in with the milk herd.”
“You can’t do two thangs at oncet,” Mr. Greenleaf remarked.
“I told you to do that first.”
He wheeled the barrow out of the open end of the trench toward the barn and she followed close behind him. “And you needn’t think, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, “that I don’t know exactly whose bull that is or why you haven’t been in any hurry to notify me he was here. I might as well feed O. T. and E. T.’s bull as long as I’m going to have him here ruining my herd.”
Mr. Greenleaf paused with the wheelbarrow and looked behind him. “Is that them boys’ bull?” he asked in an incredulous tone.
She did not say a word. She merely looked away with her mouth taut.
“They told me their bull was out but I never known that was him,” he said.
“I want that bull put up now,” she said, “and I’m going to drive over to O. T. and E. T.’s and tell them they’ll have to come get him today. I ought to charge for the time he’s been here—then it wouldn’t happen again.”
“They didn’t pay but seventy-five dollars for him,” Mr. Greenleaf offered.
“I wouldn’t have had him as a gift,” she said.
“They was just going to beef him,” Mr. Greenleaf went on, “but he got loose and run his head into their pickup truck. He don’t like cars and trucks. They had a time getting his horn out the fender and when they finally got him loose, he took off and they was too tired to run after him—but I never known that was him there.”
“It wouldn’t have paid you to know, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said. “But you know now. Get a horse and get him.”
In a half hour, from her front window she saw the bull, squirrel-colored, with jutting hips and long light horns, ambling down the dirt road that ran in front of the house. Mr. Greenleaf was behind him on the horse. “That’s a Greenleaf bull if I ever saw one,” she muttered. She went out on the porch and called, “Put him where he can’t get out.”
“He likes to bust loose,” Mr. Greenleaf said, looking with approval at the bull’s rump. “This gentleman is a sport.”
“If those boys don’t come for him, he’s going to be a dead sport,” she said. “I’m just warning you.”
He heard her but he didn’t answer.
“That’s the awfullest looking bull I ever saw,” she called but he was too far down the road to hear.
It was mid-morning when she turned into O. T. and E. T.’s driveway. The house, a new red-brick, low-to-the-ground building that looked like a warehouse with windows, was on top of a treeless hill. The sun was beating down directly on the white roof of it. It was the kind of house that everybody built now and nothing marked it as belonging to the Greenleafs except three dogs, part hound and part spitz, that rushed out from behind it as soon as she stopped her car. She reminded herself that you could always tell the class of people by the class of dog, and honked her horn. While she sat waiting for someone to come, she continued to study the house. All the windows were down and she wondered if the government could have air-conditioned the thing. No one came and she honked again. Presently a door opened and several children appeared in it and stood looking at her, making no move to come forward. She recognized this as a true Greenleaf trait—they could hang in a door, looking at you for hours.
“Can’t one of you children come here?” she called.
After a minute they all began to move forward, slowly. They had on overalls and were barefooted but they were not as dirty as she might have expected. There were two or three that looked distinctly like Greenleafs; the others not so much so. The smallest child was a girl with untidy black hair. They stopped about six feet from the automobile and stood looking at her.
“You’re mighty pretty,” Mrs. May said, addressing herself to the smallest girl.
There was no answer. They appeared to share one dispassionate expression between them.
“Where’s your Mamma?” she asked.
There was no answer to this for some time. Then one of them said something in French. Mrs. May did not speak French.
“Where’s your daddy?” she asked.
After a while, one of the boys said, “He ain’t hyar neither.”
“Ahhhh,” Mrs. May said as if something had been proven. “Where’s the colored man?”
She waited and decided no one was going to answer. “The cat has six little tongues,” she said. “How would you like to come home with me and let me teach you how to talk?” She laughed and her laugh died on the silent air. She felt as if she were on trial for her life, facing a jury of Greenleafs. “I’ll go down and see if I can find the colored man,” she said.
“You can go if you want to,” one of the boys said.
“Well, thank you,” she murmured and drove off.
The barn was down the lane from the house. She had not seen it before but Mr. Greenleaf had described it in detail for it had been built according to the latest specifications. It was a milking parlor arrangement where the cows are milked from below. The milk ran in pipes from the machines to the milk house and was never carried in no bucket, Mr. Greenleaf said, by no human hand. “When you gonter get you one?” he had asked.
“Mr. Greenleaf,” she had said, “I have to do for myself. I am not assisted hand and foot by the government. It would cost me $20,000 to install a milking parlor. I barely make ends meet as it is.”
“My boys done it,” Mr. Greenleaf had murmured, and then—”but all boys ain’t alike.”
“No indeed!” she had said. “I thank God for that!”
“I thank Gawd for ever-thang,” Mr. Greenleaf had drawled.
You might as well, she had thought in the fierce silence that followed; you’ve never done anything for yourself.
She stopped by the side of the barn and honked but no one appeared. For several minutes she sat in the car, observing the various machines parked around, wondering how many of them were paid for. They had a forage harvester and a rotary hay baler. She had those too. She decided that since no one was here, she would get out and have a look at the milking parlor and see if they kept it clean.
She opened the milking room door and stuck her head in and for the first second she felt as if she were going to lose her breath. The spotless white concrete room was filled with sunlight that came from a row of windows head-high along both walls. The metal stanchions gleamed ferociously and she had to squint to be able to look at all. She drew her head out the room quickly and closed the door and leaned against it, frowning. The light outside was not so bright but she was conscious that the sun was directly on top of her head, like a silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.
A Negro carrying a yellow calf-feed bucket appeared from around the corner of the machine shed and came toward her. He was a light yellow boy dressed in the cast-off army clothes of the Greenleaf twins. He stopped at a respectable distance and set the bucket on the ground.
“Where’s Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T.?” she asked.
“Mist O. T. he in town, Mist E. T. he off yonder in the field,” the Negro said, pointing first to the left and then to the right as if he were naming the position of two planets.
“Can you remember a message?” she asked, looking as if she thought this doubtful.
“I’ll remember it if I don’t forget it,” he said with a touch of sullenness.
“Well, I’ll write it down then,” she said. She got in her car and took a stub of pencil from her pocket book and began to write on the back of an empty envelope. The Negro came and stood at the window. “I’m Mrs. May,” she said as she wrote. “Their bull is on my place and I want him off today. You can tell them I’m furious about it.”
“That bull lef here Sareday,” the Negro said, “and none of us ain’t seen him since. We ain’t knowed where he was.”
“Well, you know now,” she said, “and you can tell Mr. O. T. and Mr. E. T. that if they don’t come get him today, I’m going to have their daddy shoot him the first thing in the morning. I can’t have that bull ruining my herd.” She handed him the note.
“If I knows Mist O. T. and Mist E. T.,” he said, taking it, “they goin to say you go ahead on and shoot him. He done busted up one of our trucks already and we be glad to see the last of him.”
She pulled her head back and gave him a look from slightly bleared eyes. “Do they expect me to take my time and my worker to shoot their bull?” she asked. “They don’t want him so they just let him loose and expect somebody else to kill him? He’s eating my oats and ruining my herd and I’m expected to shoot him too?”
“I speck you is,” he said softly. “He done busted up…”
She gave him a very sharp look and said, “Well, I’m not surprised. That’s just the way some people are,” and after a second she asked, “Which is boss, Mr. O. T. or Mr. E. T.?” She had always suspected that they fought between themselves secretly.
“They never quarls,” the boy said. “They like one man in two skins.”
“Hmp. I expect you just never heard them quarrel.”
“Nor nobody else heard them neither,” he said, looking away as if this insolence were addressed to some one else.
“Well,” she said, “I haven’t put up with their father for fifteen years not to know a few things about Greenleafs.”
The Negro looked at her suddenly with a gleam of recognition. “Is you my policy man’s mother?” he asked.
“I don’t know who your policy man is,” she said sharply. “You give them that note and tell them if they don’t come for that bull today, they’ll be making their father shoot it tomorrow,” and she drove off.
She stayed at home all afternoon waiting for the Greenleaf twins to come for the bull. They did not come. I might as well be working for them, she thought furiously. They are simply going to use me to the limit. At the supper table, she went over it again for the boys’ benefit because she wanted them to see exactly what O. T. and E. T. would do. “They don’t want that bull,” she said,”—pass the butter—so they simply turn him loose and let somebody else worry about getting rid of him for them. How do you like that? I’m the victim. I’ve always been the victim.”
“Pass the butter to the victim,” Wesley said. He was in a worse humor than usual because he had had a flat tire on the way home from the university.
Scofield handed her the butter and said, “Why Mamma, ain’t you ashamed to shoot an old bull that ain’t done nothing but give you a little scrub strain in your herd? I declare,” he said, “with the Mamma I got it’s a wonder I turned out to be such a nice boy!”
“You ain’t her boy, Son,” Wesley said.
She eased back in her chair, her fingertips on the edge of the table.
“All I know is,” Scofield said, “I done mighty well to be as nice as I am seeing what I come from.”
When they teased her they spoke Greenleaf English but Wesley made his own particular tone come through it like a knife edge. “Well lemme tell you one thang, Brother,” he said, leaning over the table, “that if you had half a mind you would already know.”
“What’s that, Brother?” Scofield asked, his broad face grinning into the constricted one across from him.
“That is,” Wesley said, “that neither you nor me is her boy…” but he stopped abruptly as she gave a kind of hoarse wheeze like an old horse lashed unexpectedly. She reared up and ran from the room.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Wesley growled, “What did you start her off for?”
“I never started her off,” Scofield said. “You started her off.”
“Hah.”
“She’s not as young as she used to be and she can’t take it.”
“She can only give it out,” Wesley said. “I’m the one that takes it.”
His brother’s pleasant face had changed so that an ugly family resemblance showed between them. “Nobody feels sorry for a lousy bastard like you,” he said and grabbed across the table for the other’s shirtfront.
From her room she heard a crash of dishes and she rushed back through the kitchen into the dining room. The hall door was open and Scofield was going out of it. Wesley was lying like a large bug on his back with the edge of the overturned table cutting him across the middle and broken dishes scattered on top of him. She pulled the table off him and caught his arm to help him rise but he scrambled up and pushed her off with a furious charge of energy and flung himself out of the door after his brother.
She would have collapsed but a knock on the back door stiffened her and she swung around. Across the kitchen and back porch, she could see Mr. Greenleaf peering eagerly through the screen wire. All her resources returned in full strength as if she had only needed to be challenged by the devil himself to regain them. “I heard a thump,” he called, “and I thought the plastering might have fell on you.”
If he had been wanted someone would have had to go on a horse to find him. She crossed the kitchen and the porch and stood inside the screen and s. iid, “No, nothing happened but the table turned over. One of the legs was weak,” and without pausing, “the boys didn’t come for the bull so tomorrow, you’ll have to shoot him.”
The sky was crossed with thin red and purple bars and behind them the sun was moving down slowly as if it were descending a ladder. Mr. Greenleaf squatted down on the step, his back to her, the top of his hat on a level with her feet. “Tomorrow I’ll drive him home for you,” he said.
“Oh no, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said in a mocking voice, “you drive him home tomorrow and next week he’ll be back here. I know better than that.” Then in a mournful tone, she said, “I’m surprised at O. T. and E. T. to treat me this way. I thought they’d have more gratitude. Those boys spent some mighty happy days on this place, didn’t they, Mr. Greenleaf?”
Mr. Greenleaf didn’t say anything.
“I think they did,” she said. “I think thev did. But they’ve forgotten all the nice little things I did for them now. If I recall, they wore my boys’ old clothes and played with my boys’ old toys and hunted with my boys’ old guns. They swam in my pond and shot my birds and fished in my stream and I never forgot their birthday and Christmas seemed to roll around very often if I remember it right. And do they think of any of those things now?” she asked.
“Nooooo,” she said.
For a few seconds she looked at the disappearing sun and Mr. Greenleaf examined the palms of his hands. Presently as if it had just occurred to her, she asked, “Do you know the real reason they didn’t come for that bull?”
“Naw I don’t,” Mr. Greenleaf said in a surly voice.
“They didn’t come because I’m a woman,” she said. “You can get away with anything when you’re dealing with a woman. If there were a man running this place…”
Quick as a snake striking Mr. Greenleaf said, “You got two boys. They know you got two men on the place.”
The sun had disappeared behind the tree line. She looked down at the dark crafty face, upturned now, and at he wary eyes, bright under the shadow of the hatbrim. She waited long enough for him to see that she was hurt and then she said, “Some people learn gratitude too late, Mr. Greenleaf, and some never learn it at all,” and she turned and left him sitting on the steps.
Half the night in her sleep she heard a sound as if some large stone were grinding a hole on the outside wall of her brain. She was walking on the inside, over a succession of beautiful rolling hills, planting her stick in front of each step. She became aware after a time that the noise was the sun trying to burn through the tree line and she stopped to watch, sate in the knowledge that it couldn’t, that it had to sink the why it always did outside of her property. When she first stopped it was a swollen red ball, but as she stood watching it began to narrow and pale until it looked like a bullet. Then suddenly it burst through the tree line and raced down the hill toward her. She woke up with her hand over her mouth and the same noise, diminished but distant, in her ear. It was the bull munching under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had let him out.
She got up and made her way to the window in the dark and looked out through the slit blind, but the bull had moved away from the hedge and at first she didn’t see him. Then she saw a heavy form some distance away, paused as if observing her. This is the last night I am going to put up with this, she said, and watched until the iron shadow moved away in the darkness.
The next morning she waited until exactly eleven o’clock. Then she got in her car and drove to the barn. Mr. Greenleaf was cleaning milk cans. He had seven of them standing up outside the milk room to get the sun. She had been telling him to do this for weeks. “All right, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, “go get your gun. We’re going to shoot that bull.”
“I thought you wanted theseyer cans…”
“Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said. Her voice and face were expressionless.
“That gentleman torn out of there last night,” he murmured in a tone of regret and bent again to the can he had his arm in.
“Go get your gun, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said in the same triumphant toneless voice. “The bull is in the pasture with the dry cows. I saw him from my upstairs window. I’m going to drive you up to the field and you can run him into the empty pasture and shoot him there.”
He detached himself from the can slowly. “Ain’t nobody ever ast me to shoot my boys’ own bull!” he said in a high rasping voice. He removed a rag from his back pocket and began to wipe his hands violently, then his nose.
She turned as if she had not heard this and said, “I’ll wait for you in the car. Go get your gun.”
She sat in the car and watched him stalk off toward the harness room where he kept a gun. After he had entered the room, there was a crash as if he had kicked something out of his way. Presently he emerged again with the gun, circled behind the car, opened the door violently and threw himself onto the seat beside her. He held the gun between his knees and looked straight ahead. He’d like to shoot me instead of the bull, she thought, and turned her face away so that he could not see her smile.
The morning was dry and clear. She drove through the woods for a quarter of a mile and then out into the open where there were fields on either side of the narrow road. The exhilaration of carrying her point had sharpened her senses. Birds were screaming everywhere, the grass was almost too bright to look at, the sky was an even piercing blue. “Spring is here!” she had gaily. Mr. Greenleaf lifted one muscle somewhere near his mouth as if he found this the most asinine remark ever made. When she stopped at the second pasture gate, he flung himself out of the car door and slammed it behind him. Then he opened the gate and she drove through. He closed it and flung himself back in, silently, and she drove around the rim of the pasture until she spotted the bull, almost in the center of it, grazing peacefully among the cows.
“The gentleman is waiting on you,” she said and gave Mr. Greenleaf’s furious profile a sly look. “Run him into that next pasture and when you get him in, I’ll drive in behind you and shut the gate myself.”
He flung himself out again, this time deliberately leaving the car door open so that she had to lean across the seat and close it. She sat smiling as she watched him make his way across the pasture toward the opposite gate. He seemed to throw himself forward at each step and then pull back as if he were calling on some power to witness that he was being forced. “Well,” she said aloud as if he were still in the car, “it’s your own boys who are making you do this, Mr. Greenleaf. “O. T. and E. T. were probably splitting their sides laughing at him now. She could hear their identical nasal voices saying, “Made Daddy shoot our bull for us. Daddy don’t know no better than to think that’s a fine bull he’s shooting. Gonna kill Daddy to shoot that bull!”
“If those boys cared a thing about you, Mr. Greenleaf,” she said, they would have come for that bull. I’m surprised at them.”
He was circling around to open the gate first. The bull, dark among the spotted cows, had not moved. He kept his head down, eating constantly. Mr. Greenleaf opened the gate and then began circling back to approach him from the rear. When he was about ten feet behind him, he flapped his arms at his sides. The bull lifted his head indolently and then lowered it again and continued to eat. Mr. Greenleaf stooped again and picked up something and threw it at him with a vicious swing. She decided it was a sharp rock for the bull leapt and then began to gallop until he disappeared over the rim of the hill. Mr. Greenleaf followed at his leisure.
“You needn’t think you’re going to lose him!” she cried and started the car straight across the pasture. She had to drive slowly over the terraces and when she reached the gate, Mr. Greenleaf and the bull were nowhere in sight. This pasture was smaller than the last, a green arena, encircled almost entirely by woods. She got out and closed the gate and stood looking for some sign of Mr. Greenleaf but he had disappeared completely. She knew at once that his plan was to lose the bull in the woods. Eventually, she would see him emerge somewhere from the circle of trees and come limping toward her and when he finally reached her, he would say, “If you can find that gentleman in them woods, you’re better than me.”
She was going to say, “Mr. Greenleaf, if I have to walk into those woods with you and stay all afternoon, we are going to find that bull and shoot him. You are going to shoot him if I have to pull the trigger for you.” When he saw she meant business he would return and shoot the bull quickly himself.
She got back into the car and drove to the center of the pasture where he would not have so far to walk to reach her when he came out of the woods. At this moment she could picture him sitting on a stump, marking lines in the ground with a stick. She decided she would wait exactly ten minutes by her watch. Then she would begin to honk. She got out of the car and walked around a little and then sat down on the front bumper to wait and rest. She was very tired and she lay her head back against the hood and closed her eyes. She did not understand why she should be so tired when it was only mid-morning. Through her closed eyes, she could feel the sun, redhot overhead. She opened her eyes slightly but the white light forced her to close them again.
For some time she lay back against the hood, wondering drowsily why she was so tired. With her eyes closed, she didn’t think of time as divided into days and nights but into past and future. She decided she was tired because she had been working continuously for fifteen years. She decided she had every right to be tired, and to rest for a few minutes before she began working again. Before any kind of judgement seat, she would be able to say: I’ve worked, I have not wallowed. At this very instant while she was recalling a lifetime of work, Mr. Greenleaf was loitering in the woods and Mrs. Greenleaf was probably flat on the ground, asleep over her holeful of clippings. The woman had got worse over the years and Mrs. May believed that now she was actually demented. “I’m afraid your wife has let religion warp her,” she said once tactfully to Mr. Greenleaf. “Everything in moderation, you know.”
“She cured a man oncet that half his gut was cat out with worms,” Mr. Greenleaf said, and she had turned away, half-sickened. Poor souls, she thought now, so simple. For a few seconds she dozed.
When she sat up and looked at her watch, more than ten minutes had passed. She had not heard any shot. A new thought occurred to her; suppose Mr. Greenleaf had aroused the bull chunking stones at him and the animal had turned on him and run him up against a tree and gored him? The irony of it deepened: O. T. and E. T. would then get a shyster lawyer and sue her. It would be the fitting end to her fifteen years with the Greenleafs. She thought of it almost with pleasure as if she had hit on the perfect ending for a story she was telling her friends. Then she dropped it, for Mr. Greenleaf had a gun with him and she had insurance.
She decided to honk. She got up and reached inside the car window and gave three sustained honks and two or three shorter ones to let him know she was getting impatient. Then she went back and sat down on the bumper again.
In a few minutes something emerged from the tree line, a black heavy shadow that tossed its head several times and then bounded forward. After a second she saw it was the bull. He was crossing the pasture toward her at a slow gallop, a gay almost rocking gait as if he were overjoyed to find her again. She looked beyond him to see if Mr. Greenleaf was coming out of the woods too but he was not. “Here he is, Mr. Greenleaf!” she called and looked on the other side of the pasture to see if he could be coming out there but he was not in sight. She looked back and saw that the bull, his head lowered, was racing toward her. She remained perfectly still, not in fright, but in a freezing unbelief. She stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if she could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip. She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.
Mr. Greenleaf was running toward her from the side with his gun raised and she saw him coming though she was not looking in his direction. She saw him approaching on the out side of some invisible circle, the tree line gaping behind him and nothing under his feet. He shot the bull four times through the eye. She did not hear the shots but she felt the quake in the huge body as it sank, pulling her forward on its head, so that she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal’s ear.
A View of the Woods (1957)
THE week before, Mary Fortune and the old man had spent every morning watching the machine that lifted out dirt and threw it in a pile. The construction was going on by the new lakeside on one of the lots that the old man had sold to somebody who was going to put up a fishing club. He and Mary Fortune drove down there every morning about ten o’clock and he parked his car, a battered mulberry-colored Cadillac, on the embankment that overlooked the spot where the work was going on. The red corrugated lake eased up to within fifty feet of the construction and was bordered on the other side by a black line of woods which appeared at both ends of the view to walk across the water and continue along the edge of the fields.
He sat on the bumper and Mary Fortune straddled the hood and they watched, sometimes for hours, while the machine systematically ate a square red hole in what had once been a cow pasture. It happened to be the only pasture that Pitts had succeeded in getting the bitter weed off and when the old man had sole it, Pitts had nearly had a stroke; and as far as Mr. Fortune was concerned, he could have gone on and had it.
“Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is not on my books,” he had said to Mary Fortune—several times from his seat on the bumper, but the child did not have eyes for anything but the machine. She sat on the hood, locking down into the red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up. Her pale eyes behind her spectacles followed the repeated motion of it again and again and her face—a small replica of the old man’s—never lost its look of complete absorption.
No one was particularly glad that Mary Fortune looked like her grandfather except the old man himself, He thought it added greatly to her attractiveness. He thought she was the smartest and the prettiest child he had ever seen and he let the rest of them know that if, IF that was, he left anything to anybody, it would be Mary Fortune he left it to. She was now nine, short and broad like himself, with his very light blue eyes, his wide prominent forehead, his steady penetrating scowl and his rich florid complexion; but she was like him on the inside too. She had, to a singular degree, his intelligence, his strong will, and his push and drive. Though there was seventy years’ difference in their ages, the spiritual distance between them was slight. She was the only member of the family he had any respect for.
He didn’t have any use for her mother, his third or fourth daughter (he could never remember which), though she considered that she took care of him. She considered—being careful not to say it, only to look it—that she was the one putting up with him in his old age and that she was the one he should leave the place to. She had married an idiot named Pitts and had had seven children, all likewise idiots except the youngest, Mary Fortune, who was a throwback to him. Pitts was the kind who couldn’t keep his hands on a nickel and Mr. Fortune had allowed them, ten years ago, to move onto his place and farm it. What Pitts made went to Pitts but the land belonged to Fortune and he was careful to keep the fact before them. When the well had gone dry, he had not allowed Pitts to have a deep well drilled but had insisted that they pipe their water from the spring. He did not intend to pay for a drilled well himself and he knew that if he let Pitts pay for it, whenever he had occasion to say to Pitts, “It’s my land you’re sitting on, ” Pitts would be able to say to him, “Well, it’s my pump that’s pumping the water you’re drinking.”
Being there ten years, the Pittses had got to feel as if they owned the place. The daughter had been born and raised on it but the old man considered that when she married Pitts she showed that she preferred Pitts to home; and when she came back, she came back like any other tenant, though he would not allow them to pay rent for the same reason he would not allow them to drill a well. Anyone over sixty years of age is in an uneasy position unless he controls the greater interest and every now and then he gave the Pittses a practical lesson by selling off a lot. Nothing infuriated Pitts more than to see him sell off a piece of the property to an outsider, because Pitts wanted to buy it himself.
Pitts was a thin, long-jawed, irascible, sullen, sulking individual and his wife was the duty-proud kind: It’s my duty to stay here and take care of Papa. Who would do it if I didn’t? I do it knowing full well I’ll get no reward for it. I do it because it’s my duty.
The old man was not taken in by this for a minute. He knew they were waiting impatiently for the day when they could put him in a hole eight feet deep and cover him up with dirt. Then, even if he did not leave the place to them, they figured they would be able to buy it. Secretly he had made his will and left everything in trust to Mary Fortune, naming his lawyer and not Pitts as executor. When he died Mary Fortune could make the rest of them jump; and he didn’t doubt for a minute that she would be able to do it.
Ten years ago they had announced that they were going to name the new baby Mark Fortune Pitts, after him, if it were a boy, and he had not delayed in telling them that if they coupled his name with the name Pitts he would put them off the place. When the baby came, a girl, and he had seen that even at the age of one day she bore his unmistakable likeness, he had relented and suggested himself that they name her Mary Fortune, after his beloved mother, who had died seventy years ago, bringing him into the world.
The Fortune place was in the country on a clay road that left the paved road fifteen miles away and he would never have been able to sell off any lots if it had not been for progress, which had always been his ally. He was not one of these old people who fight improvement, who object to everything new and cringe at every change. He wanted to see a paved highway in front of his house with plenty of new-model cars on it, he wanted to see a supermarket store across the road from him, he wanted to see a gas station, a motel, a drive-in picture-show within easy distance. Progress had suddenly set all this in motion. The electric power company had built a dam on the river and flooded great areas of the surrounding country and the lake that resulted touched his land along a half-mile stretch. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, every dog and his brother, wanted a lot on the lake. There was talk of their getting a telephone line. There was talk of paving the road that ran in front of the Fortune place. There was talk of an eventual town. He thought this should be called Fortune, Georgia. He was a man of advanced vision, even if he was seventy-nine years old.
The machine that drew up the dirt had stopped the day before and today they were watching the hole being smoothed out by two huge yellow bulldozers. His property had amounted to eight hundred acres before he began selling lots, He had sold five twentyacre lots on the back of the place and every time he sold one, Pitts’s blood pressure had gone up twenty points. “The Pittses are the kind that would let a cow pasture interfere with the future,” he said to Mary Fortune, “but not you and me.” The fact that Mary Fortune was a Pitts too was something he ignored, in a gentlemanly fashion, as if it were an affliction the child was nut responsible for. He liked to think of her as being thoroughly of his clay. He sat on the bumper and she sat on the hood with her bare feet on his shoulders. One of the bulldozers had moved under them to shave the side of the embankment they were parked on. If he had moved his feet a few inches out, the old man could have dangled them over the edge.
“If you don’t watch him,” Mary Fortune shouted above the noise of the machine, “he’ll cut off some of your dirt.”
“Yonder’s the stob,” the old man yelled, “Ill hasn’t gone beyond the stob.”
“Not YET he hasn’t,” she roared.
The bulldozer passed beneath them and went on to the far side. “Well you watch,” he said. “Keep your eyes open and if he knocks that stob, I’ll stop him. The Pittses are the kind that would let a cow pasture or a mule lot or a row of beans interfere with progress,” he continued. “The people like you and me with heads on their shoulders know you can’t stop the marcher time for a cow…”
“He’s shaking the stob on the other side!” she screamed and before he could stop her, she had jumped down from the hood and was running along the edge of the embankment, her little yellow dress billowing out behind.
“Don’t run so near the edge,” he yelled but she had already reached the stab and was squatting down by it to see how much it had been shaken. She leaned over the embankment and shook her first at the man on the bulldozer. He waved at her and went on about his business. More sense in her little finger than all the rest of that tribe in their heads put together, the old man said to himself, and watched with pride as she started back to him.
She had a head of thick, very fine, sand-colored hair—the exact kind he had had when he had had any—that grew straight and was cut just above her eyes and down the sides of her cheeks to the tips of her ears so that it formed a kind of door opening onto the central part of her face. Her glasses were silver-rimmed like his and she even walked the way he did, stomach forward, with a careful abrupt gait, something between a rock and a shuttle. She was walking so close to the edge of the embankment that the outside of her right foot was flush with it.
“I said don’t walk so close to the edge,” he called; “you fall off there and you won’t live to see the day this place gets built up.” He was always very careful to see that she avoided dangers. He would not allow her to sit in snakey places or put her hands on bushes that might hide hornets.
She didn’t move an inch. She had a habit of his of not hearing what she didn’t want to hear and since this was a little trick he had taught her himself, he had to admire the way she practiced it. He foresaw that in her own old age it would serve her well. She reached the car and climbed back onto the hood without a word and put her feet back on his shoulders where she had had them before, as if he were no more than a part of the automobile. Her attention returned to the far bulldozer.
“Remember what you won’t get if you don’t mind,” her grandfather remarked.
He was a strict disciplinarian but he had never whipped her. There were some children, like the first six Pittses, whom he thought should be whipped once a week on principle, but there were other ways to control intelligent children and he had never laid a rough hand on Mary Fortune. Furthermore, he had never allowed her mother or her brothers and sisters so much as to slap her. The elder Pitts was a different matter.
He was a man of a nasty temper and of ugly unreasonable resentments. Time and again, Mr. Fortune’s heart had pounded to see him rise slowly from his place at the table—not the head, Mr. Fortune sat there, but from his place at the side—and abruptly, for no reason, with no explanation, jerk his head at Mary Fortune and say, “Come with me,” and leave the room, unfastening his belt as he went. A look that was completely foreign to the child’s face would appear on it. The old man could not define the look but it infuriated him. It was a look that was part terror and part respect and part something else, something very like cooperation. This look would appear on her face and she would get up and follow Pitts out. They would get in his truck and drive down the road out of earshot, where he would beat her.
Mr. Fortune knew for a fact that he beat her because he had followed them in his car and had seen it happen. He had watched from behind a boulder about a hundred feet away while the child clung to a pine tree and Pitts, as methodically as if he were whacking a bush with a sling blade, beat her around the ankles with his belt. All she had done was jump up and down as if she were standing on a hot stove and make a whimpering noise like a dog that was being peppered. Pitts had kept at it for about three minutes and then he had turned, without a word, and got back in his truck and left her there, and she had slid down under the tree and taken both feet in her hands and rocked back and forth. The old man had crept forward to catch her. Her face was contorted into a puzzle of small red lumps and her nose and eyes were running. He sprang on her and sputtered, “Why didn’t you hit him back? Where’s your spirit? Do you think I’d a let him beat me?”
She had jumped up and started backing away from him with her jaw stuck out. “Nobody beat me,” she said.
“Didn’t I see it with my own eyes?” he exploded.
“Nobody is here and nobody beat me,” she said. “Nobody’s ever beat me in my life and if anybody did, I’d kill him. You can see for yourself nobody is here.”
“Do you call me a liar or a blindman!” he shouted. “I saw him with my own two eyes and you never did a thing but let him do it, you never did a thing but hang onto that tree and dance up and down a little and blubber and if it had been me, I’d a swung my fist in his face and…”
“Nobody was here and nobody beat me and if anybody did I’d kill him!” she yelled and then turned and dashed off through the woods.
“And I’m a Poland china pig and black is white!” he had roared after her and he had sat down on a small rock under the tree, disgusted and furious. This was Pitts’s revenge on him. It was as if it were he that Pitts was driving down the road to beat and it was as if he were the one submitting to it. He had thought at first that he could stop him by saying that if he beat her, he would put them off the place but when he had tried that, Pitts had said, “Put me off and you put her off too. Go right ahead. She’s mine to whip and I’ll whip her every day of the year if it suits me.”
Anytime he could make Pitts feel his hand he was determined to do it and at present he had a little scheme up his sleeve that was going to be a considerable blow to Pitts. He was thinking of it with relish when he told Mary Fortune to remember what she wouldn’t get if she didn’t mind, and he added, without waiting for an answer, that he might be selling another lot soon and that if he did, he might give her a bonus but not if she gave him any sass. He had frequent little verbal tilts with her but this was a sport like putting a mirror up in front of a rooster and watching him fight his reflection.
“I don’t want no bonus,” Mary Fortune said.
” I ain’t ever seen you refuse one.”
“You ain’t ever seen me ask for one neither,” she said.
“How much have you laid by?” he asked.
“Noner yer bidnis,” she said and stamped his shoulders with her feet. “Don’t be buttin into my bidnis.”
“I bet you got it sewed up in your mattress,” he said, “just like an old nigger woman. You ought to put it in the bank. I’m going to start you an account just as soon as I complete this deal. Won’t anybody be able to check on it but me and you.”
The bulldozer moved under them again and drowned out the rest of what he wanted to say. He waited and when the noise had passed, he could hold it in no longer. “I’m going to sell the lot right in front of the house for a gas station,” he said. “Then we won’t have to go down the road to get the car filled up, just step out the front door.”
The Fortune house was set back about two hundred feet from the road and it was this two hundred feet that he intended to sell. It was the part that his daughter airily called “the lawn” though it was nothing but a field of weeds.
“You mean,” Mary Fortune said after a minute, “the lawn?”
“Yes mam!” he said. “I mean the lawn,” and he slapped his knee.
She did not say anything and he turned and looked up at her. There in the little rectangular opening of hair was his face looking back at him, but it was a reflection not of his present expression but of the darker one that indicated his displeasure. “That’s where we play,” she muttered.
“Well there’s plenty of other places you can play,” he said, irked by this lack of enthusiasm.
“We won’t be able to see the woods across the road,” she said.
The old man stared at her. “The woods across the road?” he repeated.
“We won’t be able to see the view,” she said.
“The view?” he repeated.
“The woods,” she said; “we won’t be able to see the woods from the porch.”
“The woods from the porch?” he repeated.
Then she said, “My daddy grazes his calves on that lot.”
The old man’s wrath was delayed all instant by shock. Then it exploded in a roar. He jumped up and turned and slammed his fist on the hood of the car. “He can graze them somewheres else!”
“You fall off that embankment and you’ll wish you hadn’t,” she said.
He moved from in front of the car around to the side, keeping his eye on her all the time. “Do you think I care where he grazes his calves! Do you think I’ll let a calf interfere with my bidnis? Do you think I give a damn hoot where that fool grazes his calves?”
She sat, her red face darker than her hair, exactly reflecting his expression now. “He who calls his brother a fool is subject to hell fire,” she said.
“Jedge not,” he shouted, “lest ye be not jedged!” The tinge of his face was a shade more purple than hers. “You!” he said. “You let him beat you any time he wants to and don’t do a thing but blubber a little and jump up and down!”
“He nor nobody else has ever touched me,” she said, measuring off each word in a deadly flat tone. “Nobody’s ever put a hand on me and if anybody did, I’d kill him.”
“And black is white,” the old man piped, “and night is day!”
The bulldozer passed below them. With their faces about a foot apart, each held the same expression until the noise had receded. Then the old man said, “Walk home by yourself. I refuse to ride a Jezebel!”
“And I refuse to ride with the Whore of Babylon,” she said and slid off the other side of the car and started off through the pasture.
“A whore is a woman!” he roared. “That’s how much you know!” But she did not deign to turn around and answer him back, and as he watched the small robust figure stalk across the yellow-dotted field toward the woods, his pride in her, as if it couldn’t help itself, returned like the gentle little tide on the new lake—all except that part of it that had to do with her refusal to stand up to Pitts; that pulled back like an undertow. If he could have taught her to stand up to Pitts the way she stood up to him, she would have been a perfect child, as fearless and sturdy-minded as anyone could want; but it was her one failure of character. It was the one point on which she did not resemble him. He turned and looked away over the lake to the woods across it and told himself that in five years, instead of woods, there would be houses and stores and parking places, and that the credit for it could go largely to him.
He meant to teach the child spirit by example and since he had definitely made up his mind, he announced that noon at the dinner table that he was negotiating with a man named Tilman to sell the lot in front of the house for a gas station.
His daughter, sitting with her worn-out air at the foot of the table, let out a moan as if a dull knife were being tuned slowly in her chest. “You mean the lawn!” she moaned and fell back in her chair and repeated in an almost inaudible voice, “He means the lawn.”
The other six Pitts children began to bawl and pipe, “Where we play!” “Don’t let him do that, Pa!”
“We won’t be able to see the road!” and similar idiocies. Mary Fortune did not say anything. She had a mulish reserved look as if she were planning some business of her own. Pitts had stopped eating and was staring in front of him. His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it. His eyes began to move from child to child around the table as if he were hunting for one particular one of them. Finally they stopped on Mary Fortune sitting next to her grandfather. “You done this to us,” he muttered.
“I didn’t,” she said but there was no assurance in her voice. It was only a quaver, the voice of a frightened child.
Pitts got up and said, “Come with me,” and turned and walked out, loosening his belt as he went, and to the old man’s complete despair, she slid away from the table and followed him, almost ran after him, out the door and into the truck behind him, and they drove off.
This cowardice affected Mr. Fortune as if it were his own. It made him physically sick. “He beats an innocent child,” he said to his daughter, who was apparently still prostrate at the end of the table, “and not one of you lifts a hand to stop him.”
“You ain’t lifted yours neither,” one of the boys said in an undertone and there was a general mutter from that chorus of frogs.
“I’m an old man with a heart condition,” he said. “I can’t stop an ox.”
“She put you up to it,” his daughter murmured in a languid listless tone, her head rolling back and forth on the rim of her chair. “She puts you up to everything.”
“No child never put me up to nothing!” he yelled. “You’re no kind of a mother! You’re a disgrace! That child is an angel! A saint!” he shouted in a voice so high that it broke and he had to scurry out of the room.
The rest of the afternoon he had to lie on his bed. His heart, whenever he knew the child had been beaten, felt as if it were slightly too large for the space that was supposed to hold it. But now he was more determined than ever to see the filling station go up in front of the house, and if it gave Pitts a stroke, so much the better. If it gave him a stroke and paralyzed him, he would be served right and he would never be able to beat her again.
Mary Fortune was never angry with him for long, or seriously, and though he did not see her the rest of that day, when he woke up the next morning, she was sitting astride his chest ordering him to make haste so that they would not miss the concrete mixer.
The workmen were laying the foundation for the fishing club when they arrived and the concrete mixer was already in operation. It was about the size and color of a circus elephant; they stood and watched it churn for a half-hour or so. At eleven-thirty, the old man had an appointment with Tilman to discuss his transaction and they had to leave. He did not tell Mary Fortune where they were going but only that he had to see a man.
Tilman operated a combination country store, filling station, scrap-metal dump, used-car lot and dance hall five miles down the highway that connected with the dirt road that passed in front of the Fortune place. Since the dirt road would soon be paved, he wanted a good location on it for another such enterprise. He was an up-and-coming man-the kind, Mr. Fortune thought, who was never just in line with progress but always a little ahead of it so that he could be there to meet it when it arrived. Signs up and down the highway announced that Tilman’s was only five miles away, only four, only three, only two, only one; “Watch out for Tilman’s, Around this bend!” and finally, “Here it is, Friends, TILMAN’S!” in dazzling red letters.
Tilman’s was bordered on either side by a field of old used-car bodies, a kind of ward for incurable automobiles. He also sold outdoor ornaments, such as stone cranes and chickens, urns, jardinieres, whirligigs, and farther back from the road, so as not to depress his dance-hall customers, a line of tombstones and monuments. Most of his businesses went on out-of-doors, so that his store building itself had not involved excessive expense. It was a one-room wooden structure onto which he had added, behind, a long tin hall equipped for dancing. This was divided into two sections, Colored and White, each with its private nickelodeon. He had a barbecue pit and sold barbecued sandwiches and soft drinks.
As they drove up under the shed of Tilman’s place, the old man glanced at the child sitting with her feet drawn up on the seat and her chin resting on her knees. He didn’t know if she would remember that it was Tilman he was going to sell the lot to or not.
“What you going in here for?” she asked suddenly, with a sniffing look as if she scented an enemy.
“Noner yer bidnis,” he said. “You just sit in the car and when I come out, I’ll bring you something.”
“Don’tcher bring me nothing,” she said darkly, “because I won’t be here.”
“Haw!” he said. “Now you’re here, it’s nothing for you to do but wait,” and he got out and without paying her any further attention, he entered the dark store where Tilman was waiting for him.
When he came out in half an hour, she was not in the car. Hiding, he decided. He started walking around the store to see if she was in the back. He looked in the doors of the two sections of the dance hall and walked on around by the tombstones. Then his eye roved over the field of sinking automobiles and he realized that she could be in or behind anyone of two hundred of t hem, He came back out in front of the store. A Negro boy, drinking a purple drink, was sitting on the ground with his back against the sweating ice cooler.
“Where did that little girl go to, boy?” he asked.
“I ain’t seen nair little girl,” the boy said.
The old man irritably fished in his pocket and handed him a nickel and said, “A pretty little girl in a yeller cotton dress.”
“If you speakin about a stout chile look lak you,” the boy said, “she gone off in a truck with a white man.”
“What kind of a truck, what kind of a white man’” he yelled.
“It were a green pick-up truck,” the boy said smacking his lips, “and a white man she call ‘daddy.’ They gone that-a-way some time ago.”
The old man, trembling, got in his car and starrted home. His feelings raced back and forth between fur y and mortification. She had never left him before and certainly never for Pitts. Pitts had ordered her to get in the truck and she was afraid not to. But when he reached this conclusion he was more furious than ever. What was the matter with her that she couldn’t stand up to Pitts? Why was there this one flaw in her character when he had trained her so well in everything else? It was an ugly mystery.
When he reached the house and climbed the front steps, there she was sitting in the swing, looking glum-faced in front of her across the field he was going to sell. Her eyes were puffy and pinkrimmed but he didn’t see any red marks on her legs. He sat down in the swing beside her. He meant to make his voice severe but instead it came out crushed, as if it belonged to a suitor trying to reinstate himself.
“What did you leave me for? You ain’t ever left me before,” he said.
“Because I wanted to,” she said, looking straight ahead.
“You never wanted to,” he said. “He made you.”
“I toljer I was going and I went,” she said in a slow emphatic voice, not looking at him, “and now you can go on and lemme alone.” There was something very final, in the sound of this, a tone that had not come up before in their disputes. She stared across the lot where there was nothing but a profusion of pink and yellow and purple weeds, and on across the red road, to the sullen line of black pine woods fringed on top with green. Behind that line was a narrow gray-blue line of more distant woods and beyond that nothing but the sky, entirely blank except for one or two threadbare clouds. She looked into this scene as if it were a person that she preferred to him.
“It’s my lot, ain’t it?” he asked. “Why are you so up-in-the-air about me selling my own lot?”
“Because it’s the lawn,” she said. Her nose and eyes began to run horribly but she held her face rigid and licked the water off as soon as it was in reach of her tongue. “We won’t be able to see across the road,” she said.
The old man looked across the road to assure himself again that there was nothing over there to see. “I never have seen you act in such a way before,” he said in an incredulous voice. “There’s not a thing over there but the woods.”
“We won’t be able to see ‘urn,” she said, “and that’s the lawn and my daddy grazes his calves on it.”
At that the old man stood up. “You act more like a Pitts than a Fortune,” he said. He had never made such an ugly remark to her before and he was sorry the instant he had said it. It hurt him more than it did her. He turned and went in the house and upstairs to his room.
Several times during the afternoon, he got up from his bed and looked out the window across the “lawn” to the line of woods she said they wouldn’t be able to see any more. Every time he saw the same thing: woods—not a mountain, not a waterfall, not any kind of planted bush or flower, just woods. The sunlight was woven through them at that particular time of the afternoon so that every thin pine trunk stood out in all its nakedness. A pine trunk is a pine trunk, he said to himself, and anybody that wants to see one don’t have to go far in this neighborhood. Every time he got up and looked out, he was reconvinced of his wisdom in selling the lot. The dissatisfaction it caused Pitts would be permanent, but he could make it up to Mary Fortune by buying her something. With grown people, a road led either to heaven or hell, but with children there were always stops along the way where their attention could be turned with a trifle.
The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six o’clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised if. a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them. The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood. After a few minutes this unpleasant vision was broken by the presence of Pitts’s pick-up truck grinding to a halt below the window. He returned to his bed and shut his eyes and against the closed lids hellish red trunks rose up in a black wood.
At the supper table nobody addressed a word to him, including Mary Fortune. He ate quickly and returned again to his room and spent the evening pointing out to himself the advantages for the future of having an establishment like Tilman’s so near. They would not have to go any distance for gas. Anytime they needed a loaf of bread, all they would have to do would be step out their front door into Tilman’s back door. They could sell milk to Tilman. Tilman was a likable fellow. Tilman would draw other business. The road would soon be paved. Travelers from all over the country would stop at Tilman’s. If his daughter thought she was better than Tilman, it would be well to take her down a little. All men were created free and equal. When this phrase sounded in his head, his patriotic sense triumphed and he realized that it was his duty to sell the lot, that he must insure the future. He looked out the window at the moon shining over the woods across the road and listened for a while to the hum of crickets and treefrogs, and beneath their racket, he could hear the throb of the future town of Fortune.
He went to bed certain that just as usual, he would wake up in the morning looking into a little red mirror framed in a door of fine hair. She would have forgotten all about the sale and after breakfast they would drive into town and get the legal papers from the courthouse. On the way back he would stop at Tilman’s and close the deal.
When he opened his eyes in the morning, he opened them on the empty ceiling. He pulled himself up and looked around the room but she was not there. He hung over the edge of the bed and looked beneath it but she was not there either. He got up and dressed and went outside. She was sitting in the swing on the front porch, exactly the way she had been yesterday, looking across the lawn into the woods. The old man was very much irritated. Every morning since she had been able to climb, he had waked up to find her either on his bed or underneath it. It was apparent that this morning she preferred the sight of the woods. He decided to ignore her behavior for the present and then bring it up later when she was over her pique. He sat down in the swing beside her but she continued to look at the woods. “I thought you and me’d go into town and have us a look at the boats in the new boat store,” he said.
She didn’t turn her head but she asked suspiciously, in a loud voice. “What else are you going for?”
“Nothing else,” he said.
After a pause she said, “If that’s all, I’ll go,” but she did not bother to look at him.
“Well put on your shoes,” he said. “I ain’t going to the city with a barefoot woman.” She did not bother to laugh at this joke.
The weather was as indifferent as her disposition. The sky did not look as if it were going to rain or as if it were not going to rain. It was an unpleasant gray and the sun had not troubled to come out. All the way into town, she sat looking at her feet, which stuck out in front of her, encased in heavy brown school shoes. The old man had often sneaked up on her and found her alone in conversation with her feet and he thought she was speaking with them silently now. Every now and then her lips moved but she said nothing to him and let all his remarks pass as if she had not heard them. He decided it was going to cost him considerable to buy her good humor again and that he had better do it with a boat, since he wanted one too. She had been talking boats ever since the water backed up onto his place. They went first to the boat store. “Show us the yachts for po’ folks!” he shouted jovially to the clerk as they entered.
“They’re all for po’ folks!” the clerk said. “You’ll be po’ when you finish buying one!” He was a stout youth in a yellow shirt and blue pants and he had a ready wit. They exchanged several clever remarks in rapid-fire succession. Mr. Fortune looked at Mary Fortune to see if her face had brightened. She stood staring absently over the side of an outboard motor boat at the opposite wall.
“Ain’t the lady innerested in boats?” the clerk asked.
She turned and wandered back out onto the sidewalk and got in the car again. The old man looked after her with amazement. He could not believe that a child of her intelligence could be acting this way over the mere sale of a field. “I think she must be coming down with something,” he said. “We’ll come back again,” and he returned to the car.
“Let’s go get us an ice-cream cone,” he suggested, looking at her with concern.
“I don’t want no ice-cream cone,” she said.
His actual destination was the courthouse but he did not want to make this apparent. “How’d you like to visit the tencent store while I tend to a little bidnis of mine?” he asked. “You can buy yourself something with a quarter I brought along.”
“I ain’t got nothing to do in no tencent store,” she said. “I don’t want no quarter of yours.”
If a boat was of no interest, he should not have thought a quarter would be and reproved himself for that stupidity. “Well what’s the matter, sister?” he asked kindly. “Don’t you feel good?”
She turned and looked him straight in the face arid said with a slow concentrated ferocity, “It’s the lawn. My daddy grazes his calves there. We won’t be able to see the woods any more.”
The old man had held his fury in as long as he could. “He beats you!” he shouted. “And you worry about where he’s going to graze his calves!”
“Nobody’s ever beat me in my life,” she said, “and if anybody did, I’d kill him.”
A man seventy-nine years of age cannot let himself be run over by a child of nine. His face set in a look that was just a; determined as hers. “Are you a Fortune,” he said, “or are you a Pitt? Make up your mind.”
Her voice was loud and positive and belligerent “I’m Mary—Fortune—Pitts,” she said.
“Well I,” he shouted, “am PURE Fortune!”
There was nothing she could say to this and she showed it. For an instant she looked completely defeated, and the old man saw with a disturbing clearness that this was the Pitts look. What he saw was the Pitts look, pure and simple, and he felt personally stained by it, as if it had been found on his own face. He turned in disgust and backed the car out and drove straight to the courthouse.
The courthouse was a red and white blaze-faced building set in the center of a square from which most of the grass had been worn off. He parked in front of it and said, “Stay here,” in an imperious tone and got out and slammed the car door.
It took him a half-hour to get the deed and have the sale paper drawn up and when he returned to the car, she was sitting on the back seat in the corner. The expression on that part her face that he could see was foreboding and withdrawn. The sky had darkened also and there was a hot sluggish tide in the air, the kind felt when a tornado is possible.
“We better get on before we get caught in a storm” he said and emphatically, “because I got one more place to stop on the way home,” but he might have been chauffeuring a small dead body for all the answer he got.
On the way to Tilman’s he reviewed once more he many just reasons that were leading him to his present action and he could not locate a flaw in any of them. He decided that while this attitude of hers would not he permanent, he was permanently disappointed in her and that when she came around she would have to apologize; and that there would be no boat. He was coming to realize slowly that his trouble with her had always been that he had not shown enough firmness. He had been too generous. He was so occupied with these thoughts that he did not notice the signs that said how many miles to Tilman’s until the last one exploded joyfully in his face: “Here it is, Friends, TILMAN’S!” He pulled in under the shed.
He got out without so much as looking at Mary Fortune and entered the dark store where Tilman, leaning on the counter in front of a triple shelf of canned goods. was waiting for him.
Tilman was a man of quick action and few words. He sat habitually with his arms folded on the counter and his insignificant head weaving snake-fashion above them. He had a triangular-shaped face with the point at the bottom and the top of his skull was covered with a cap of freckles. His eyes were green and very narrow and his tongue was always exposed in his partly opened mouth. He had his checkbook handy and they got down to business at once. It did not take him long to look at the deed and sign the bill of sale. Then Mr. Fortune signed it and they grasped hands over the counter.
Mr. Fortune’s sense of relief as he grasped Tilman’s hand was extreme. What was done, he felt, was done and there could be no more argument, with her or with himself. He felt that he had acted on principle and that the future was assured.
Just as their hands loosened, an instant’s change came over Tilman’s face and he disappeared completely under the counter as if he had been snatched by the feet from below. A bottle crashed against the line of tinned goods behind where he had been. The old man whirled around. Mary Fortune was in the door, red-faced and wild-looking, with another bottle lifted to hurl. As he ducked, it broke behind him on the counter and she grabbed another from the crate. He sprang at her but she tore to the other side of the store, screaming something unintelligible and throwing everything within her reach. The old man pounced again and this time he caught her by the tail of her dress and pulled her backward out of the store. Then he got a better grip and lifted her, wheezing and whimpering but suddenly limp in his arms, the few feet to the car. He managed to get the door open and dump her inside. Then he ran around to the other side and got in himself and drove away as fast as he could.
His heart felt as if it were the size of the car and was racing forward, carrying him to some inevitable destination faster than he had ever been carried before. For the first five minutes he did not think but only sped forward as if he were being driven inside his own fury. Gradually the power of thought returned to him. Mary Fortune, rolled into a ball in the corner of the seat, was snuffling and heaving.
He had never seen a child behave in such a way in his life. Neither his own children nor anyone else’s had ever displayed such temper in his presence, and he had never for an instant imagined that the child he had trained himself, the child who had been his constant companion for nine years, would embarrass him like this. The child he had never lifted a hand to!
Then he saw, with the sudden vision that sometimes comes with delayed recognition, that that had been his mistake.
She respected Pitts because, even with no just cause, he beat her; and if he—with his just cause—did not beat her now, he would have nobody to blame but himself if she turned out a hellion. He saw that the time had come, that he could no longer avoid whipping her, and as he turned off the highway onto the dirt road leading to home, he told himself that when he finished with her, she would never throw another bottle again.
He raced along the clay road until he came to the line where his own property began and then he turned off onto a side path, just wide enough for the automobile and bounced for a half a mile through the woods. He stopped the car at the exact spot where he had seen Pitts take his belt to her. It was a place where the road widened so that two cars could pass or one could turn around, an ugly red bald spot surrounded by long thin pines that appeared to be gathered there to witness anything that would take place in such a clearing. A few stones protruded from the clay.
“Get out,” he said and reached across her and opened the door.
She got out without looking at him or asking what they were going to do and he got out on his side and carne around the front of the car.
“Now I’m going to whip you!” he said, and his voice was extra loud and hollow and had a vibrating quality that appeared to be taken up and passed through the tops of the pines. He did not want to get caught in a downpour while he was whipping her and he said, “Hurry up and get ready against that tree,” and began to take of his belt.
What he had in mind to do appeared to come very slowly as if it had to penetrate a fog in her head. She did not move but gradually her confused expression began to clear. Where a few seconds before her face had been red and distorted and unorganized, it drained now of every vague line until nothing was left on it but positiveness, a look that went slowly past determination and reached certainty. “Nobody has ever beat me,” she said, “and if anybody tries it, I’ll kill him.”
“I don’t want no sass,” he said and started toward her. His knees felt very unsteady, as if they might turn either backward or forward.
She moved exactly one step back and, keeping her eye on him steadily, removed her glasses and dropped them behind a small rock near the tree he had told her to get ready against. “Take off your glasses,” she said.
“Don’t give me orders!” he said in a high, voice and slapped awkwardly at her ankles with his belt. She was on him so quickly that he could not have recalled which blow he felt first, whether the weight of her whole solid body or the jabs of her feet or the pummeling of her fist on his chest. He flailed the belt in the air, not knowing where to hit but trying to get her off him until he could decide where to get a grip on her.
“Leggo!” he shouted. “Leggo I tell you!” But she seemed to be everywhere, coming at him from all directions at once. It was as if he were being attacked not by one child but by a pack of small demons all with stout brown school shoe, and small rocklike fists. His glasses flew to the side.
“I toljer to take them off,” she growled without pausing.
He caught his knee and danced on one foot and a rain of blows fell on his stomach. He felt five claws in the flesh of his upper arm where she was hanging from while her feet mechanically battered his knees and her free fist pounded him again and again in the chest. Then with horror he saw her face rise up in front of his, teeth exposed, and he roared like a bull as she bit the side of his jaw. He seemed to see his own face coming to bite him from several sides at once but he could not attend to it for he was being kicked indiscriminately, in the stomach and then in the crotch. Suddenly he threw himself on the ground and began to roll like a man on fire. She was on top of him at once, rolling with him and still kicking, and now with both fists free to batter his chest.
“I’m an old man!” he piped. “Leave me alone!” But she did not stop. She began a fresh assault on his jaw.
“Stop stop!” he wheezed. “I’m your grandfather!”
She paused, her face exactly on top of his. Pale identical eye looked into pale identical eye. “Have you had enough?” she asked.
The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant and hostile. “You been whipped,” it said, “by me,” and then it added, bearing down on each word, “and I’m PURE Pitts.”
In the pause she loosened her grip and he got hold of her throat. With a sudden surge of strength, he managed to roll over and reverse their positions so that he was looking down into the face that was his own but had dared to call itself Pitts. With his hands still tight around her neck, he lifted her head and brought it down once hard against the rock that happened to be under it. Then he brought it down twice more. Then looking into the face in which the eyes, slowly rolling back, appeared to pay him not the slightest attention, he said, “There’s not an ounce of Pitts in me.”
He continued to stare at his conquered image until he perceived that though it was absolutely silent, there was no look of remorse on it. The eyes had rolled back down and were set in a fixed glare that did not take him in. “This ought to teach you a good lesson,” he said in a voice that was edged with doubt.
He managed painfully to get up on his unsteady kicked legs and to take two steps, but the enlargement of his heart which had begun in the car was still going on. He turned his head and looked behind him for a long time at the little motionless figure with its head on the rock.
Then he fell on his back and looked up helplessly along the bare trunks into the tops of the pines and his heart expanded once more with a convulsive motion. It expanded so fast that the old man felt as if he were being pulled after it through the woods, felt as if he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward the lake. He perceived that there would be a little opening there, a little place where he could escape and leave the woods behind him. He could see it in the distance already, a little opening where the white sky was reflected in the water. It grew as he ran toward it until suddenly the whole lake opened up before him, riding majestically in little corrugated folds toward his feet. He realized suddenly that he could not swim and that he had not bought the boat. On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and away into the distance. He looked around desperately for someone to help him but the place was deserted except for one huge yellow monster which sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging itself on clay.
The Enduring Chill (1958)
Asbury’s train stopped so that he would get off exactly where his mother was standing waiting to meet him. Her thin spectacled face below him was bright with a wide smile that disappeared as she caught sight of him bracing himself behind the conductor. The smile vanished so suddenly, the shocked look that replaced it was so complete, that he realized for the first time that he must look as ill as he was. The sky was a chill gray and a startling white-gold sun, like some strange potentate from the east, was rising beyond the black woods that surrounded Timberboro. It cast a strange light over the single block of one-story brick and wooden shacks. Asbury felt that he was about to witness a majestic transformation, that the flat of roofs might at any moment turn into the mounting turrets of some exotic temple for a god he didn’t know. The illusion lasted only a moment before his attention was drawn back to his mother.
She had given a little cry; she looked aghast. He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped down and greeted her.
“You don’t look very well,” she said and gave him a long clinical stare.
“I don’t feel like talking,” he said at once. “I’ve had a bad trip.”
Mrs. Fox observed that his left eye was bloodshot. He was puffy and pale and his hair had receded tragically for a boy of twenty-five. The thin reddish wedge of it left on top bore down in a point that seemed to lengthen his nose and give him an irritable expression that matched his tone of voice when he spoke to her. “It must have been cold up there,” she said. “Why don’t you take off your coat? It’s not cold down here.”
“You don’t have to tell me what the temperature is!” he said in a high voice. “I’m old enough to know when I want to take my coat off!” The train glided silently away behind him, leaving a view of the twin blocks of dilapidated stores. He gazed after the aluminum speck disappearing into the woods. It seemed to him that his last connection with a larger world were vanishing forever. Then he turned and faced his mother grimly, irked that he had allowed himself, even for an instant, to see an imaginary temple in this collapsing country junction. He had become entirely accustomed to the thought of death, but he had not become accustomed to the thought of death here.
He had felt the end coming on for nearly four months. Alone in his freezing flat, huddled under his two blankets and his overcoat and with three thicknesses of the New York Times between, he had had a chill one night, followed by a violent sweat that left the sheets soaking and removed all doubt from his mind about his true condition. Before this there had been a gradual slackening of his energy and vague inconsistent aches and headaches. He had been absent so many days from his part-time job in the bookstore that he had lost it. Since then he had been living, or just barely so, on his savings and these, diminishing day by day, had been all he had between him and home. Now there was nothing. He was here.
“Where’s the car?” he muttered.
“It’s over yonder,” his mother said. “And your sister is asleep in the back because I don’t like to come out this early by myself. There’s no need to wake her up.”
“No,” he said, “let sleeping dogs lie,” and he picked up his two bulging suitcases and started across the road with them.
They were too heavy for him and by the time he reached the car, his mother saw that he was exhausted. He had never come home with two suitcases before. Ever since he had first gone away to college, he had come back every time with nothing but the necessities for a two-week stay and with a wooden resigned expression that said he was prepared to endure the visit for exactly fourteen days. “You’ve brought more than usual,” she observed, but he did not answer.
The Comforts of Home (1960)
Thomas withdrew to the side of the window and with his head between the wall and the curtain he looked down on the driveway where the car had stopped. His mother and the little slut were getting out of it. His mother emerged slowly, stolid and awkward, and then the little slut’s long slightly bowed legs slid out, the dress pulled above the knees. With a shriek of laughter she ran to meet the dog, who bounded, overjoyed, shaking with pleasure, to welcome her. Rage gathered throughout Thomas’s large frame with a silent ominous intensity, like a mob assembling.
It was now up to him to pack a suitcase, go to the hotel, and stay there until the house should be cleared.
He did not know where a suitcase was, he disliked to pack, he needed his books, his typewriter was not portable, he was used to an electric blanket, he could not bear to eat in restaurants. His mother, with her daredevil charity, was about to wreck the peace of the house.
The back door slammed and the girl’s laugh shot up from the kitchen, through the back hall, up the stairwell and into his room, making for him like a bolt of electricity. He jumped to the side and stood glaring about him. His words of the morning had been unequivocal: “If you bring that girl back into this house, I leave. You can choose—her or me.”
She had made her choice. An intense pain gripped his throat. It was the first time in his thirtyfive years… He felt a sudden burning moisture behind his eyes. Then he steadied himself, overcome by rage. On the contrary: she had not made any choice. She was counting on his attachment to his electric blanket. She would have to be shown.
The girl’s laughter rang upward a second time and Thomas winced. He saw again her look of the night before. She had invaded his room. He had waked to find his door open and her in it. There was enough light from the hall to make her visible as she turned toward him. The face was like a comedienne’s in a musical comedy—a pointed chin, wide apple cheeks and feline empty eyes. He had sprung out of his bed and snatched a straight chair and then he had backed her out the door, holding the chair in front of him like an animal trainer driving out a dangerous cat. He had driven her silently down the hall, pausing when he reached it to beat on his mother’s door. The girl, with a gasp, turned and fled into the guest room.
In a moment his mother had opened her door and peered out apprehensively. Her face, greasy with whatever she put on it at night, was framed in pink rubber curlers. She looked down the hall where the girl had disappeared. Thomas stood before her, the chair still lifted in front of him as if he were about to quell another beast. “She tried to get in my room,” he hissed, pushing in. “I woke up and she was trying to get in my room.” He closed the door behind him and his voice rose in outrage. “I won’t put up with this! I won’t put up with it another day!”
His mother, backed by him to her bed, sat down on the edge of it. She had a heavy body on which sat a thin, mysteriously gaunt and incongruous head.
“I’m telling you for the last time,” Thomas said, “I won’t put up with this another day.” There was an observable tendency in all of her actions. This was, with the best intentions in the world, to make a mockery of virtue, to pursue it with such a mindless intensity that everyone involved was made a fool of and virtue itself became ridiculous. “Not another day,” he repeated.
His mother shook her head emphatically, her eyes still on the door.
Thomas put the chair on the floor in front of her and sat down on it He leaned forward as if he were about to explain something to a defective child.
“That’s just another way she’s unfortunate,” his mother said. “So awful, so awful. She told me the name of it but I forget what it is but it’s something she can’t help. Something she was born with. Thomas,” she said and put her hand to her jaw, “suppose it were you?”
Exasperation blocked his windpipe. “Can’t I make you see,” he croaked, “that if she can’t help herself you can’t help her?”
His mother’s eyes, intimate but untouchable, were the blue of great distances after sunset. “Nimpermaniac,” she murmured.
“Nymphomaniac,” he said fiercely. “She doesn’t need to supply you with any fancy names. She’s a moral moron. That’s all you need to know. Born without the moral faculty—like somebody else would be born without a kidney or a leg. Do you understand?”
“I keep thinking it might be you,” she said, her hand still on her jaw. “If it were you, how do you think I’d feel if nobody took you in? What if you were a nimpermaniac and not a brilliant smart person and you did what you couldn’t help and…“
Thomas felt a deep unbearable loathing for himself as if he were turning slowly into the girl.
“What did she have on?” she asked abruptly, her eyes narrowing.
“Nothing!” he roared. Now will you get her out of here!”
“How can I turn her out in the cold?” she said. “This morning she was threatening to kill herself again.”
“Send her back to jail,” Thomas said.
“I would not send you back to jail, Thomas,” she said.
He got up and snatched the chair and fled the room while he was still able to control himself.
Thomas loved his mother. He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery and he sensed about him forces, invisible currents entirely out of his control. She proceeded always from the tritest of considerations—it was the nice thing to do—into the most foolhardy engagements with the devil, whom, of course, she never recognized.
The devil for Thomas was only a manner of speaking, but it was a manner appropriate to the situations his mother got into. Had she been in any degree intellectual, he could have proved to her from early Christian history that no excess of virtue is justified, that a moderation of good produces likewise a moderation in evil, that if Antony of Egypt had stayed at home and attended to his sister, no devils would have plagued him.
Thomas was not cynical and so far from being opposed to virtue, he saw it as the principle of order and the only thing that makes life bearable. His own life was made bearable by the fruits of his mother’s saner virtues—by the well regulated house she kept and the excellent meals she served. But when virtue got out of hand with her, as now, a sense of devils grew upon him, and these were not mental quirks in himself or the old lady, they were denizens with personalities, present though not visible, who might any moment be expected to shriek or rattle a pot.
The girl had landed in the county jail a month ago on a bad check charge and his mother had seen her picture in the paper. At the breakfast table she had gazed at it for a long time and then had passed it over the coffee pot to him. “Imagine,” she said, “only nineteen years old and in that filthy jail. And she doesn’t look like a bad girl.”
Thomas glanced at the picture. It showed the face of a shrewd ragamuffin. He observed that the average age for criminality was steadily lowering.
“She looks like a wholesome girl,” his mother said.
“Wholesome people don’t pass bad checks,” Thomas said.
“You don’t know what you’d do in a pinch.”
“I wouldn’t pass a bad check,” Thomas said.
“I think,” his mother said, “I’ll take her a little box of candy.”
If then and there he had put his foot down, nothing else would have happened. His father, had he been living, would have put his foot down at that point. Taking a box of candy was her favorite nice thing to do. When anyone within her social station moved to town, she called and took a box of candy; when any of her friend’s children had babies or won a scholarship, she called and took a box of candy; when an old person broke his hip, she was at his bedside with a box of candy. He had been amused at the idea of her taking a box of candy to the jail.
He stood now in his room with the girl’s laugh rocketing away in his head and cursed his amusement.
When his mother returned from the visit to the jail, she had burst into his study without knocking and had collapsed full-length on his couch, lifting her small swollen feet up on the arm of it. After a moment, she recovered herself enough to sit up and put a newspaper under them. Then she fell pack again. “We don’t know how the other half lives,” she said.
Thomas knew that though her conversation moved from cliche to cliche there were real experiences behind them. He was less sorry for the girl’s being in jail than for his mother having to see her there. He would have spared her all unpleasant sights. “Well,” he said and put away his journal, “you had better forget it now. The girl has ample reason to be in jail.”
“You can’t imagine what all she’s been through,” she said, sitting up again, “listen.” The poor girl, Star, had been brought up by a stepmother with three children of her own, one an almost grown boy who had taken advantage of her in such dreadful ways that she had been forced to run away and find her real mother. Once found, her real mother had sent her to various boarding schools to get rid of her. At each of these she had been forced to run away by the presence of perverts and sadists so monstrous that their acts defied description. Thomas could tell that his mother had not been spared the details that she was sparing him. Now and again when she spoke vaguely, her voice shook and he could tell that she was remembering some horror that had been put to her graphically. He had hoped that in a few days the memory of all this would wear off, but it did not. The next day she returned to the jail with Kleenex and cold-cream and a few days later, she announced that she had consulted a lawyer.
It was at these times that Thomas truly mourned the death of his father though he had not been able to endure him in life. The old man would have had none of this foolishness. Untouched by useless compassion, he would (behind her back) have pulled the necessary strings with his crony, the sheriff, and the girl would have been packed off to the state penitentiary to serve her time. He had always been engaged in some enraged action until one morning when (with an angry glance at his wife as if she alone were responsible) he had dropped dead at the breakfast table. Thomas had inherited his father’s reason without his ruthlessness and his mother’s love of good without her tendency to pursue it. His plan for all practical action was to wait and see what developed.
The lawyer found that the story of the repeated atrocities was for the most part untrue, but when he explained to her that the girl was a psychopathic personality, not insane enough for the asylum, not criminal enough for the jail, not stable enough for society, Thomas’s mother was more deeply affected than ever. The girl readily admitted that her story was untrue on account of her being a congenital liar; she lied, she said, because she was insecure. She had passed through the hands of several psychiatrists who had put the finishing touches to her education. She knew there was no hope for her. In the presence of such an affliction as this, his mother seemed bowed down by some painful mystery that nothing would make endurable but are doubling of effort. To his annoyance, she appeared to look on him with compassion, as if her hazy charity no longer made distinctions.
A few days later she burst in and said that the lawyer had got the girl paroled—to her.
Thomas rose from his Morris chair, dropping the review he had been reading. His large bland face contracted in anticipated pain. “You are not,” he said, “going to bring that girl here!”
“No, no,” she said, “calm yourself, Thomas.” She had managed with difficulty to get the girl a job in a pet shop in town and a place to board with a crotchety old lady of her acquaintance. People were not kind. They did not put themselves in the place of someone like Star who had everything against her.
Thomas sat down again and retrieved his review. He seemed just to have escaped some danger which he did not care to make clear to himself. “Nobody can tell you anything,” he said, “but in a few days that girl will have left town, having got what she could out of you. You’ll never hear from her again.”
Two nights later he came home and opened the parlor door and was speared by a shrill depthless laugh. His mother and the girl sat close to the fireplace where the gas logs were lit. The girl gave the immediate impression of being physically crooked. Her hair was cut like a dog’s or an elf’s and she was dressed in the latest fashion. She was training on him a long familiar sparkling stare that turned after a second into an intimate grin.
“Thomas!” his mother said, her voice firm with the injunction not to bolt, “this is Star you’ve heard so much about. Star is going to have supper with us.”
The girl called herself Star Drake. The lawyer had found that her real name was Sarah Ham.
Thomas neither moved nor spoke but hung in the door in what seemed a savage perplexity. Finally he said, “How do you do, Sarah,” in a tone of such loathing that he was shocked at the sound of it. He reddened, feeling it beneath him to show contempt for any creature so pathetic. He advanced into the room, determined at least on a decent politeness and sat down heavily in a straight chair.
“Thomas writes history,” his mother said with a threatening look at him. “He’s president of the local Historical Society this year.”
The girl leaned forward and gave Thomas an even more pointed attention. “Fabulous!” she said in a throaty voice.
“Right now Thomas is writing about the first settlers in this county,” his mother said.
“Fabulous!” the girl repeated.
Thomas by an effort of will managed to look as if he were alone in the room.
“Say, you know who he looks like?” Star asked, her head on one side, taking him in at an angle.
“Oh someone very distinguished!” his mother said archly.
“This cop I saw in the movie I went to last night,” Star said.
“Star,” his mother said, “I think you ought to be careful about the kind of movies you go to. I think you ought to see only the best ones. I don’t think crime stories would be good for you.”
“Oh this was a crime-does-not-pay,” Star said, “and I swear this cop looked exactly like him. They were always putting something over on the guy. He would look like he couldn’t stand it a minute longer or he would blow up. He was a riot. And not bad looking,” she added with an appreciative leer at Thomas.
“Star,” his mother said, “I think it would be grand if you developed a taste for music.”
Thomas sighed. His mother rattled on and the girl, paying no attention to her, let her eyes play over him. The quality of her look was such that it might have been her hands, resting now on his knees, now on his neck. Her eyes had a mocking glitter and he knew that she was well aware he could not stand the sight of her. He needed nothing to tell him he was in the presence of the very stuff of corruption, but blameless corruption because there was no responsible faculty behind it. He was looking at the most unendurable form of innocence. Absently he asked himself what the attitude of God was to this, meaning if possible to adopt it. His mother’s behavior throughout the meal was so idiotic that he could barely stand to look at her and since he could less stand to look at Sarah Ham, he fixed on the sideboard across the room a continuous gaze of disapproval and disgust. Every remark of the girl’s his mother met as if it deserved serious attention. She advanced several plans for the wholesome use of Star’s spare time. Sarah Ham paid no more attention to this advice than if it came from a parrot. Once when Thomas inadvertently looked in her direction, she winked. As soon as he had swallowed the last spoonful of dessert, he rose and muttered, “I have to go, I have a meeting.”
“Thomas,” his mother said, “I want you to take Star home on your way. I don’t want her riding in taxis by herself at night.”
For a moment Thomas remained furiously silent. Then he turned and left the room. Presently he came back with a look of obscure determination on his face. The girl was ready, meekly waiting at the parlor door. She cast up at him a great look of admiration and confidence. Thomas did not offer his arm but she took it anyway and moved out of the house and down the steps, attached to what might have been a miraculously moving monument.
“Be good!” his mother called.
Sarah Ham snickered and poked him in the ribs.
While getting his coat he had decided that this would be his opportunity to tell the girl that unless she ceased to be a parasite on his mother, he would see to it, personally, that she was returned to jail. He would let her know that he understood what she was up to, that he was not an innocent and that there were certain things he would not put up with. At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue.
She curled her feet up under her and said, “Alone at last,” and giggled.
Thomas swerved the car away from the house and drove fast toward the gate. Once on the highway, he shot forward as if he were being pursued.
“Jesusl” Sarah Ham said, swinging her feet off the seat, “where’s the fire?”
Thomas did not answer. In a fcw seconds he could feel her edging closer. She stretched, eased nearer, and finally hung her hand limply over his shoulder. “Tomsee doesn’t like me,” she said, “but I think he’s fabulously cute.”
Thomas covered the three and a half miles into town in a little over four minutes. The light at the first intersection was red but he ignored it. The old woman lived three blocks beyond. When the car screeched to a halt at the place, he jumped out and ran around to the girl’s door and opened it. She did not move from the car and Thomas was obliged to wait. After a moment one leg emerged, then her small white crooked face appeared and stared up at him. There was something about the look of it that suggested blindness but it was the blindness of those who don’t know that they cannot see. Thomas was curiously sickened. The empty eyes moved over him. “Nobody likes me,” she said in a sullen tone. “What if you were me and I couldn’t stand to ride you three miles?”
“My mother likes you,” he muttered.
“Her!” the girl said. “She’s just about seventy-five years behind the times!”
Breathlessly Thomas said, “If I find you bothering her again, I’ll have you put back in jail.” There was a dull force behind his voice though it came out barely above a whisper.
“You and who else?” she said and drew back in the car as if now she did not intend to get out at all. Thomas reached into it, blindly grasped the front of her coat, pulled her out by it and released her. Then he lunged back to the car and sped off. The other door was still hanging open and her laugh, bodiless but real, bounded up the street as if it were about to jump in the open side of the car and ride away with him. He reached over and slammed the door and then drove toward home, too angry to attend his meeting. He intended to make his mother well aware of his displeasure. He intended to leave no doubt in her mind. The voice of his father rasped in his head.
Numbskull, the old man said, put your foot down now. Show her who’s boss before she shows you.
But when Thomas reached home, his mother, wisely, had gone to bed.
The next morning he appeared at the breakfast table, his brow lowered and the thrust of his jaw indicating that he was in a dangerous humor. When he intended to be determined, Thomas began like a bull that, before charging, backs with his head lowered and paws the ground. “All right now listen,” he began, yanking out his chair and sitting down, “I have something to say to you about that girl and I don’t intend to say it but once.” He drew breath. “She’s nothing but a little slut. She makes fun of you behind your back. She means to get everything she can out of you and you are nothing to her.”
His mother looked as if she too had spent a restless night. She did not dress in the morning but wore her bathrobe and a grey turban around her head, which gave her face a disconcerting omniscient look. He might have been breakfasting with a sibyl.
“You’ll have to use canned cream this morning”, she said, pouring his coffee. “I forgot the other.”
“All right, did you hear me?” Thomas growled.
“I’m not deaf,” his mother said and put the pot back on the, trivet. “I know I’m nothing but an old bag of wind to her.
“Then why do you persist in this foolhardy…”
“Thomas,” she said, and put her hand to the side of her face, “it might be…”
“It is not me!” Thomas said, grasping the table leg at his knee.
She continued to hold her face, shaking her head slightly. “Think of all you have,” she began. “All the comforts of home. And morals, Thomas. No bad inclinations, nothing bad you were born with.”
Thomas began to breathe like some one who feels the onset of asthma. “You are not logical,” he said in a limp voice. “He would have put his foot down.”
The old lady stiffened. “You,” she said, “are not like him.”
Thomas opened his mouth silently.
“However,” his mother said, in a tone of such subtle accusation that she might have been taking back the compliment, “I won’t invite her back again since you’re so dead set against her.”
“I am not set against her,” Thomas said. “I am set against your making a fool of yourself.”
As soon as he left the table and closed the door of his study on himself, his father took up a squatting position in his mind. The old man had had the countryman’s ability to converse squatting, though he was no countryman but had been born and brought up in the city and only moved to a smaller place later to exploit his talents. With steady skill he had made them think him one of them. In the midst of a conversation on the courthouse lawn, he would squat and his two or three companions would squat with him with no break in the surface of the talk. By gesture he had lived his lie; he had never deigned to tell one.
Let her run over you, he said. You ain’t like me. Not enough to be a man.
Thomas began vigorously to read and presently the image faded. The girl had caused a disturbance in the depths of his being, somewhere out of the reach of his power of analysis. He felt as if he had seen a tornado pass a hundred yards away and had an intimation that it would turn again and head directly for him. He did not get his mind firmly on his work until mid-morning.
Two nights later, his mother and he were sitting in the den after their supper, each reading a section of the evening paper, when the telephone began to ring with the brassy intensity of a fire alarm. Thomas reached for it. As soon as the receiver was in his hand, a shrill female voice screamed into the room, “Come get this girl! Come get her! Drunk! Drunk in my parlor and I won’t have it! Lost her job and come back here drunk! I won’t have it!”
His mother leapt up and snatched the receiver.
The ghost of Thomas’s father rose before him. Call the sheriff, the old man prompted. “Call the sheriff,” Thomas said in a loud voice. “Call the sheriff to go there and pick her up.”
“We’ll be right there,” his mother was saying. “We’ll come and get her right away. Tell her to get her things together.”
“She ain’t in no condition to get nothing together,” the voice screamed. “You shouldn’t have put something like her off on me! My house is respectable!”
“Tell her to call the sheriff,” Thomas shouted.
His mother put the receiver down and looked at him. “I wouldn’t turn a dog over to that man,” she said.
Thomas sat in the chair with his arms folded and looked fixedly at the wall.
“Think of the poor girl, Thomas,” his mother said, “with nothing. Nothing. And we have everything.”
When they arrived, Sarah Ham was slumped spraddlelegged against the banister on the boarding house front steps. Her tam was down on her forehead where the old woman had slammed it and her clothes were bulging out of her suitcase where the old woman had thrown them in. She was carrying on a drunken conversation with herself in a low personal tone. A streak of lipstick ran up one side of her face. She allowed herself to be guided by his mother to the car and put in the back seat without seeming to know who the rescuer was. “Nothing to talk to all day but a pack of goddamned parakeets,” she said in a furious whisper.
Thomas, who had not got out of the car at all, or looked at her after the first revolted glance, said, “I’m telling you, once and for all, the place to take her is the jail.”
His mother, sitting on the back seat, holding the girl’s hand, did not answer.
“All right, take her to the hotel,” he said.
“I cannot take a drunk girl to a hotel, Thomas,” she said. “You know that.”
“Then take her to a hospital.”
“She doesn’t need a jail or a hotel or a hospital,” his mother said, “she needs a home.”
“She does not need mine,” Thomas said.
“Only for tonight, Thomas,” the old lady sighed. “Only for tonight.”
Since then eight days had passed. The little slut was established in the guest room. Every day his mother set out to find her a job and a place to board, and failed, for the old woman had broadcast a warning. Thomas kept to his room or the den. His home was to him home, workshop, church, as personal as the shell of a turtle and as necessary. He could not believe that it could be violated in this way. His flushed face had a constant look of stunned outrage.
As soon as the girl was up in the morning, her voice throbbed out in a blues song that would rise and waver, then plunge low with insinuations of passion about to be satisfied and Thomas, at his desk, would lunge up and begin frantically stuffing his ears with Kleenex. Each time he started from one room to another, one floor to another, she would be certain to appear. Each time he was half way up or down the stairs, she would either meet him and pass, cringing coyly, or go up or down behind him, breathing small tragic spearmint-flavored sighs. She appeared to adore Thomas’s repugnance to her and to draw it out of him every chance she got as if it added delectably to her martyrdom.
The old man—small, wasp-like, in his yellowed panama hat, his seersucker suit, his pink carefully-soiled shirt, his small string tie—appeared to have taken up his station in Thomas’s mind and from there, usually squatting, he shot out the same rasping suggestion every time the boy paused from his forced studies. Put your foot down. Go to see the sheriff.
The sheriff was another edition of Thomas’s father except that he wore a checkered shirt and a Texas type hat and was ten years younger. He was as easily dishonest, and he had genuinely admired the old man. Thomas, like his mother, would have gone far out of his way to avoid his glassy pale blue gaze. He kept hoping for another solution, for a miracle.
With Sarah Ham in the house, meals were unbearable.
“Tomsee doesn’t like me,” she said the third or fourth night at the supper table and cast her pouting gaze across at the large rigid figure of Thomas, whose face was set with the look of a man trapped by insufferable odors. “He doesn’t want me here. Nobody wants me anywhere.”
“Thomas’s name is Thomas,” his mother interrupted. “Not Tomsee.”
“I made Tomsee up,” she said. “I think it’s cute. He hates me.”
“Thomas does not hate you,” his mother said. “We are not the kind of people who hate,” she added, as if this were an imperfection that had been bred out of them generations ago.
“Oh, I know when I’m not wanted,” Sarah Ham continued. “They didn’t even want me in jail. If I killed myself I wonder would God want me?”
“Try it and see,”Thomas muttered.
The girl screamed with laughter. Then she stopped abruptly, her face puckered and she began to shake.” The best thing to do,” she said, her teeth clattering, “is to kill myself. Then I’ll be out of everybody’s way. I’ll go to hell and be out of God’s way. And even the devil won’t want me. He’ll kick me out of hell, not even in hell…” she wailed.
Thomas rose, picked up his plate and knife and fork and carried them to the den to finish his supper. After that, he had not eaten another meal at the table but had had his mother serve him at his desk. At these meals, the old man was intensely present to him. He appeared to be tipping backwards in his chair, his thumbs beneath his galluses, while he said such things as, She never ran me away from my own table.
A few nights later, Sarah Ham slashed her wrists with a paring knife and had hysterics. From the den where he was closeted after supper, Thomas heard a shriek, then a series of screams, then his mother’s scurrying footsteps through the house. He did not move. His first instant of hope that the girl had cut her throat faded as he realized she could not have done it and continue to scream the way she was doing. He returned to his journal and presently the screams subsided. In a moment his mother burst in with his coat and hat. “We have to take her to the hospital,” she said. “She tried to do away with herself. I have a tourniquet on her arm. Oh Lord, Thomas,” she said, “imagine being so low you’d do a thing like that!”
Thomas rose woodenly and put on his hat and coat. “We will take her to the hospital,” he said, “and we will leave her there.”
“And drive her to despair again?” the old lady cried. “Thomas!”
Standing in the center of his room now, realizing that he had reached the point where action was inevitable, that he must pack, that he must leave, that he must go, Thomas remained immovable.
His fury was directed not at the little slut but at his mother. Even though the doctor had found that she had barely damaged herself and had raised the girl’s wrath by laughing at the tourniquet and putting only a streak of iodine on the cut, his mother could not get over the incident. Some new weight of sorrow seemed to have been thrown across her shoulders, and not only Thomas, but Sarah Ham was infuriated by this, for it appeared to be a general sorrow that would have found another object no matter what good fortune came to either of them. The experience of Sarah Ham had plunged the old lady into mourning for the world.
The morning after the attempted suicide, she had gone through the house and collected all the knives and scissors and locked them in a drawer. She emptied a bottle of rat poison down the toilet and took up the roach tablets from the kitchen floor. Then she came to Thomas’s study and said in a whisper, “Where is that gun of his? I want you to lock it up.”
“The gun is in my drawer,” Thomas roared, “and I will not lock it up. If she shoots herself, so much the better!”
“Thomas,” his mother said, “she’ll hear you!”
“Let her hear me!” Thomas yelled. “Don’t you know she has no intention of killing herself? Don’t you know her kind never kill themselves? Don’t you…”
His mother slipped out the door and closed it to silence him and Sarah Ham’s laugh, quite close in the hall, came rattling into his room. “Tomsee’ll find out. I’ll kill myself and then he’ll be sorry he wasn’t nice to me. I’ll use his own lil gun, his own lil or pearl-handled revol-Iervuh!” she shouted and let out a loud tormented-sounding laugh in imitation of a movie monster.
Thomas ground his teeth. He pulled out his desk drawer and felt for the pistol. It was an inheritance from the old man, whose opinion it had been that every house should contain a loaded gun. He had discharged two bullets one night into the side of a prowler, but Thomas had never shot anything. He had no fear that the girl would use the gun on herself and he closed the drawer. Her kind clung tenaciously to life and were able to wrest some histrionic advantage from every moment.
Several ideas for getting rid of her had entered his head but each of these had been suggestions whose moral tone indicated that they had come from a mind akin to his father’s, and Thomas had rejected them. He could not get the girl locked up again until she did something illegal. The old man would have been able with no qualms at all to get her drunk and send her out on the highway in his car, meanwhile notifying the highway patrol of her presence on the road, but Thomas considered this below his moral stature. Suggestions continued to come to him, each more outrageous than the last.
He had not the vaguest hope that the girl would get the gun and shoot herself, but that afternoon when he looked in the drawer, the gun was gone. His study locked from the inside, not the out. He cared nothing about the gun, but the thought of Sarah Ham’s hands sliding among his papers infuriated him. Now even his study was contaminated. The only place left untouched by her was his bedroom.
That night she entered it.
In the morning at breakfast, he did not eat and did not sit down. He stood beside his chair and delivered his ultimatum while his mother sipped her coffee as if she were both alone in the room and in great pain. “I have stood this,” he said, “for as long as I am able. Since I see plainly thaty ou care nothing about me, about my peace or comfort or working conditions, I am about to take the only step open to me. I will give you one more day. If you bring the girl back into this house this afternoon, I leave. You can choose—her or me.” He had more to say but at that point his voice cracked and he left.
At ten o’clock his mother and Sarah Ham left the house.
At four he heard the car wheels on the gravel and rushed to the window. As the car stopped, the dog stood up, alert, shaking.
He seemed unable to take the first step that would set him walking to the closet in the hall to look for the suitcase. He was like a man handed a knife and told to operate on himself if he wished to live. His huge hands clenched helplessly. His expression was a turmoil of indecision and outrage. His pale blue eyes seemed to sweat in his broiling face. He closed them for a moment and on the back of his lids, his father’s image leered at him. Idiot! the old man hissed, idiot! The criminal slut stole your gun! See the sheriff! See the sheriff!
It was a moment before Thomas opened his eyes. He seemed newly stunned. He stood where he was for at least three minutes, then he turned slowly like a large vessel reversing its direction and faced the door. He stood there a moment longer, then he left, his face set to see the ordeal through.
He did not know where he would find the sheriff. The man made his own rules and kept his own hours. Thomas stopped first at the jail where his office was, but he was not in it. He went to the courthouse and was told by a clerk that the sheriff had gone to barbershop across the street. “Yonder’s the deppity,” the clerk said and pointed out the window to the large figure of a man in a checkered shirt, who was leaning against the side of a police car, looking into space.
“It has to be the sheriff,” Thomas said and left for the barbershop. As little as he wanted anything to do with the sheriff, he realized that the man was at least intelligent and not simply a mound of sweating flesh.
The barber said the sheriff had just left. Thomas started back to the courthouse and as he stepped on to the sidewalk from the street, he saw a lean, slightly stooped figure gesticulating angrily at the deputy.
Thomas approached with an aggressiveness brought on by nervous agitation. He stopped abruptly three feet away and said in an over-loud voice, “Can I have a word with you?” without adding the sheriff’s name, which was Farebrother.
Farebrother turned his sharp creased face just enough to take Thomas in, and the deputy did likewise, but neither spoke. The sheriff removed a very small piece of cigarette from his lip and dropped it at his feet. “I told you what to do,” he said to the deputy. Then he moved off with a slight nod that indicated Thomas could follow him if he wanted to see him. The deputy slunk around the front of the police car and got inside.
Farebrother, with Thomas following, headed across the courthouse square and stopped beneath a tree that shaded a quarter of the front lawn. He waited, leaning slightly forward, and lit another cigarette.
Thomas began to blurt out his business. As he had not had time to prepare his words, he was barely coherent. By repeating the same thing over several times, he managed at length to get out what he wanted to say. When he finished, the sheriff was still leaning slightly forward, at an angle to him, his eyes on nothing in particular. He remained that way without speaking. Thomas began again, slower and in a lamer voice, and Farebrother let him continue for some time before he said, ‘We had her oncet.” He then allowed himself a slow, creased, all-knowing, quarter smile.
“I had nothing to do with that,” Thomas said. “That was my mother.”
Farebrother squatted.
“She was trying to help the girl,” Thomas said. “She didn’t know she couldn’t be helped.”
“Bit off more than she could chew, I reckon,” the voice below him mused.
“She has nothing to do with this,” Thomas said. “She doesn’t know I’m here. The girl is dangerous with that gun.”
“He,” the sheriff said, “never let anything grow under his feet. Particularly nothing a woman planted.”
“She might kill somebody with that gun,” Thomas said weakly, looking down at the round top of the Texas type hat.
There was a long time of silence.
“Where’s she got it?” Farebrother asked.
“I don’t know. She sleeps in the guest room. It must be in there, in her suitcase probably,” Thomas said.
Farebrother lapsed into silence again.
“You could come search the guest room,” Thomas said in a strained voice. “I can go home and leave the latch off the front door and you can come in quietly and go upstairs and search her room.”
Farebrother turned his head so that his eyes looked boldly at Thomas’s knees. “You seem to know how it ought to be done,” he said. “Want to swap jobs?”
Thomas said nothing because he could not think of anything to say, but he waited doggedly. Farebrother removed the cigarette butt from his lips and dropped it on the grass. Beyond him on the courthouse porch a group of loiterers who had been leaning at the left of the door moved over to the right where a patch of sunlight had settled. From one of the upper windows a crumpled piece of paper blew out and drifted down. “I’ll come along about six,” Farebrother said. “Leave the latch off the door and keep out of my way—yourself and them two women too.” Thomas let out a rasping sound of relief meant to be “Thanks,” and struck off across the grass like some one released. The phrase, “them two women,” stuck like a burr in his brain—the subtlety of the insult to his mother hurting him more than any of Farebrother’s references to his own incompetence. As he got into his car, his face suddenly flushed. Had he delivered his mother over to the sheriff—to be a butt for the man’s tongue? Was he betraying her to get rid of the little slut? He saw at once that this was not the case. He was doing what he was doing for her own good, to rid her of a parasite that would ruin their peace. He started his car and drove quickly home but once he had turned in the driveway, he decided it would be better to park some distance from the house and go quietly in by the back door. He parked on the grass and on the grass walked in a circle toward the rear of the house. The sky was lined with mustard-colored streaks. The dog was asleep on the back doormat. At the approach of his master’s step, he opened one yellow eye, took him in, and closed it again.
Thomas let himself into the kitchen. It was empty and the house was quiet enough for him to be aware of the loud ticking of the kitchen clock. It was a quarter to six. He tiptoed hurriedly through the hall to the front door and took the latch off it. Then he stood for a moment listening. From behind the closed parlor door, he heard his mother snoring softly and presumed that she had gone to sleep while reading. On the other side of the hall, not three feet from his study, the little slut’s black coat and red pocketbook were slung on a chair. He heard water running upstairs and decided she was taking a bath.
He went into his study and sat down at his desk to wait, noting with distaste that every few moments a tremor ran through him. He sat for a minute or two doing nothing. Then he picked up a pen and began to draw squares on the back of an envelope that lay before him. He looked at his watch. It was eleven minutes to six. After a moment he idly drew the center drawer of the desk out over his lap. For a moment he stared at the gun without recognition. Then he gave a yelp and leaped up. She had put it back!
Idiot! his father hissed, idiot! Go plant it in her pocketbook.
Don’t just stand there. Go plant it in her pocketbook!
Thomas stood staring at the drawer.
Moron! the old man fumed. Quick while there’s time! Go plant it in her pocketbook.
Thomas did not move.
Imbecile! his father cried.
Thomas picked up the gun.
Make haste, the old man ordered.
Thomas started forward, holding the gun away from him. He opened the door and looked at the chair. The black coat and red pocketbook were lying on it almost within reach.
Hurry up, you fool, his father said.
From behind the parlor door the almost inaudible snores of his mother rose and fell. They seemed to mark an order of time that had nothing to do with the instants left to Thomas. There was no other sound.
Quick, you imbecile, before she wakes up, the old man said.
The snores stopped and Thomas heard the sofa springs groan. He grabbed the red pocketbook. It had a skin-like feel to his touch and as it opened, he caught an unmistakable odor of the girl. Wincing, he thrust in the gun and then drew back. His face burned an ugly dull red.
“What is Tomsee putting in my purse?” she called and her pleased laugh bounced down the staircase. Thomas whirled.
She was at the top of the stair, coming down in the manner of a fashion model, one bare leg and then the other thrusting out the front of her kimona in a definite rhythm. “Tomsee is being naughty,” she said in a throaty voice. She reached the bottom and cast a possessive leer at Thomas whose face was now more grey than red. She reached out, pulled the bag open with her finger and peered at the gun.
His mother opened the parlor door and looked out.
“Tomsee put his pistol in my bag!” the girl shrieked.
“Ridiculous,” his mother said, yawning. “What would Thomas want to put his pistol in your bag for?”
Thomas stood slightly hunched, his hands hanging helplessly at the wrists as if he had just pulled them up out of a pool of blood.
“I don’t know what for,” the girl said, “but he sure did it,” and she proceeded to walk around Thomas, her hands on her hips, her neck thrust forward and her intimate grin fixed on him fiercely. All at once her expression seemed to open as the purse had opened when Thomas touched it. She stood with her head cocked on one side in an attitude of disbelief. “Oh boy,” she said slowly, “is he a case.”
At that instant Thomas damned not only the girl but the entire order of the universe that made her possible.
“Thomas wouldn’t put a gun in your bag,” his mother said. “Thomas is a gentleman.”
The girl made a chortling noise. “You can see it in there,” she said and pointed to the open purse.
You found it in her bag, you dimwit! the old man hissed.
“I found it in her bag!” Thomas shouted. “The dirty criminal slut stole my gun!”
His mother gasped at the sound of the other presence in his voice. The old lady’s sybil-like face turned pale.
“Found it my eye!” Sarah Ham shrieked and started for the pocketbook, but Thomas, as if his arm were guided by his father, caught it first and snatched the gun. The girl in a frenzy lunged at Thomas’s throat and would actually have caught him around the neck had not his mother thrown herself forward to protect her.
Fire! the old man yelled.
Thomas fired. The blast was like a sound meant to bring an end to evil in the world. Thomas heard it as a sound that would shatter the laughter of sluts until all shrieks were stilled and nothing was left to disturb the peace of perfect order.
The echo died away in waves. Before the last one had faded, Farebrother opened the door and put his head inside the hall. His nose wrinkled. His expression for some few seconds was that of a man unwilling to admit surprise. His eyes were clear as glass, reflecting the scene. The old lady lay on the floor between the girl and Thomas.
The sheriff’s brain worked instantly like a calculating machine. He saw the facts as if they were already in print: the fellow had intended all along to kill his mother and pin it on the girl. But Farebrother had been too quick for him. They were not yet aware of his head in the door. As he scrutinized the scene, further insights were flashed to him. Over her body, the killer and the slut were about to collapse into each other’s arms. The sheriff knew a nasty bit when he saw it. He was accustomed to enter upon scenes that were not as bad as he had hoped to find them, but this one met his expectations.
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1961)
HER doctor had told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or weight. She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her.
She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid that for it. No, I shouldn’t have. I’ll take it off and return it tomorrow. I shouldn’t have bought it.”
Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should have bought it,” he said. “Put it on and let’s go.” It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.
She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten. were it not that she was a widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,” she might have been a little girl that he had to take to town.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “Let’s go.” He opened the door himself and started down the walk to get her going. The sky was a dying violet and houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ughness though no two were alike. Since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward and his eyes glazed with the determination to make himself completely numb during the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure.
The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming toward him. “Well,” she said, “you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at least won’t meet myself coming and going.”
“Some day I’ll start making money,” Julian said gloomily—he knew he never would—“and you can have one of those jokes whenever you take the fit.” But first they would move. He visualized a place where the nearest neighbors would be three miles away on either side.
“I think you’re doing fine,” she said, drawing on her gloves. “You’ve only been out of school a year. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who arrived in hat and gloves and who had a son who had been to college. “It takes time,” she said, “and the world is in such a mess. This hat looked better on me than any of the others, though when she brought it out I said, ‘Take that thing back. I wouldn’t have it on my head,’ and she said, ‘Now wait till you see it on,’ and when she put it on me, I said, ‘We-ull,’ and she said, ‘If you ask me, that hat does something for you and you do something for the hat, and besides,’ she said, ‘with that hat, you won’t meet yourself coming and going.’”
Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith. Catching sight of his long, hopeless, irritated face, she stopped suddenly with a grief-stricken look, and pulled back on his arm. “Wait on me,” she said. “I’m going back to the house and take this thing off and tomorrow I’m going to return it. I was out of my head. I can pay the gas bill with that seven-fifty.”
He caught her arm in a vicious grip. “You are not going to take it back,” he said. “I like it.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t think I ought…”
“Shut up and enjoy it,” he muttered, more depressed than ever.
“With the world in the mess it’s in,” she said, “it’s a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top.” Julian sighed.
“Of course,” she said, “if you know who you are, you can go anywhere.” She said this every time he took her to the reducing class. “Most of them in it are not our kind of people,” she said, “but I can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am.”
“They don’t give a damn for your graciousness,” Julian said savagely. “Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.”
She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him. “I most certainly do know who I am,” she said, “and if you don’t know who you are, I’m ashamed of you.”
“Oh hell,” Julian said.
“Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state,” she said. “Your grandfather was a prosperous landowner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh.”
“Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and see where you are now?” and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood, which the growing darkness at least made less dingy.
“You remain what you are,” she said. ‘Tour great-grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves.”
“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.
“They were better off when they were,” she said. He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station: “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”
“Let’s skip it,” Julian said.
“The ones I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that are half white. They’re tragic.”
“Will you skip it?”
“Suppose we were half white. We would certainly have mixed feelings.”
“I have mixed feelings now,” he groaned.
“Well let’s talk about something pleasant,” she said. “I remember going to Grandpa’s when I was a little girl. Then the house had double stairways that went up to what was really the second floor—all the cooking was done on the first. I used to like to stay down in the kitchen on account of the way the walls smelled. I would sit with my nose pressed against the plaster and take deep breaths. Actually the place belonged to the Godhighs but your grandfather Chestny paid the mortgage and saved it for them. They were in reduced circumstances,” she said, “but reduced or not, they never forgot who they were.”
“Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them,” Julian muttered. He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing. He had seen it once when he was a child before it had been sold. The double stairways had rotted and been torn down. Negroes were living it. But it remained in his mind as his mother had known it. It appeared in his dreams regularly. He would stand on the wide porch, listening to the rustle of oak leaves, then wander through the high-ceilinged hall into the parlor that opened onto it and gaze at the worn rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him that it was he, not she, who could have appreciated it. He preferred its threadbare elegance to anything he could name and it was because of it that all the neighborhoods they had lived in had been a torment to him—whereas she had hardly known the difference. She called her insenseitivity “being adjustable.”
“And I remember the old darky who was my nurse, Caroline. There was no better person in the world. I’ve always had a great respect for my colored friends,” she said. “I’d do anything in the world for them and they’d…”
“Will you for God’s sake get off that subject?” Julian said. When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother’s sins.
“You’re mighty touchy tonight,” she said. “Do you feel all right?”
“Yes I feel all right,” he said. “Now lay off.”
She pursed her lips. “Well, you certainly are in a vile humor,” she observed. “I just won’t speak to you at all.”
They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket.
She stiffened. “Why must you look like that when you take me to town?” she said. “Why must you deliberately embarrass me?”
“If you’ll never learn where you are,” he said, “you can at least learn where I am.”
“You look like a-thug,” she said.
“Then I must be one,” he murmured.
“I’ll just go home,” she said. “I will not bother you. If you can’t do a little thing like that for me…”
Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. “Restored to my class,” he muttered. He thrust his face toward her and hissed, “True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.”
“It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are.”
“Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.”
“I care who I am,” she said icily.
The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and as it approached, they moved out into the street to meet it. He put his hand under her elbow and hoisted her up on the creaking step. She entered with a little smile, as if she were going into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting for her. While he put in the tokens, she sat down on one of the broad front seats for three which faced the aisle. A thin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair was sitting on the end of it. His mother moved up beside her and left room for Julian beside herself. He sat down and looked at the floor across the aisle where a pair of thin feet in red and white canvas sandals were planted.
His mother immediately began a general conversation meant to attract anyone who felt like talking. “Can it get any hotter?” she said and removed from her purse a folding fan, blade with a Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter before her.
“I reckon it might could,” the woman with the protruding teeth said, “but I know for a fact my apartment couldn’t get no hotter.”
“It must get the afternoon sun,” his mother said. She sat forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled. Everybody was white. “I see we have the bus to ourselves,” she said. Julian cringed.
“For a change,” said the woman across the aisle, the owner of the red and white canvas sandals. “I come on one the other day and they were thick as fleas—up front and all through.”
“The world is in a mess everywhere,” his mother said. “I don’t know how we’ve let it get in this fix.”
“What gets my goat is all those boys from good families stealing automobile tires,” the woman with the protruding teeth said. “I told my boy, I said you may not be rich but you been raised right and if I ever catch you in any such mess, they can send you on to the reformatory. Be exactly where you belong.”
“Training tells,” his mother said. “Is your boy in high school?”
“Ninth grade,” the woman said.
“My son just finished college last year. He wants to write but he’s selling typewriters until he gets started,” his mother said.
The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He threw her such a malevolent look that she subsided against the seat. On the floor across the aisle there was an abandoned newspaper. He got up and got it and opened it out in front of him. His mother discreetly continued the conversation in a lower tone but the woman across the aisle said in a loud voice, “Well that’s nice. Selling typewriters is close to writing. He can go right from one to the other.”
“I tell him,” his mother said, “that Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.
The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if she had started from any of the right premises, more might have been expected of her. She lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world, outside of which he had never seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice herself for him after she had first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things. If he had permitted her sacrifices, it was only because her lack of foresight had made them necessary. All of her life had been a struggle to act like a Chestny without the Chestny goods, and to give him everything she thought a Chestny ought to have; but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why complain? And when you had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on the hard times! He could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the struggle and that she thought she had won.
What she meant when she said she had won was that she had brought him up successfully and had sent him to college and that he had turned out so well—good looking (her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened), intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to be a success), and with a future ahead of him (there was of course no future ahead of him). She excused his gloominess on the grounds that he was still growing up and his radical ideas on his lack of practical experience. She said he didn’t yet know a thing about ‘life,” that he hadn’t even entered the real world—when already he was as disenchanted with it as a man of fifty.
The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, he had turned out so well. In spite of going to only a third-rate college, he had, on his own initiative, come out with a firstrate education; in spite of growing up dominated by a small mind, he had ended up with a large one; in spite of all her foolish views, he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity. He was not dominated by his mother.
The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him from his meditation. A woman from the back lurched forward with little steps and barely escaped falling in his newspaper as she righted herself. She got off and a large Negro got on. Julian kept his paper lowered to watch. It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles. The Negro was well dressed and carried a briefcase. He looked around and then sat down on the other end of the seat where the woman with the red and white canvas sandals was sitting. He immediately unfolded a newspaper and obscured himself behind it. Julian’s mother’s elbow at once prodded insistently into his ribs. “Now you see why I won’t ride on these buses by myself,” she whispered.
The woman with the red and white canvas sandals had risen at the same time the Negro sat down and had gone further back in the bus and taken the seat of the woman who had got off. His mother leaned forward and cast her an approving look.
Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and sat down in the place of the woman with the canvas sandals. From this position, he looked serenely across at his mother. Her face had turned an angry red. He stared at her, making his eyes the eyes of a stranger. He felt his tension suddenly lift as if he had openly declared war on her.
He would have liked to get in conversation with the Negro and to talk with him about art or politics or any subject that would be above the comprehension of those around them, but the man remained entrenched behind his paper. He was either ignoring the change of seating or had never noticed it. There was no way for Julian to convey his sympathy.
His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his face. The woman with the protruding teeth was looking at him avidly as if he were a type of monster new to her.
“Do you have a light?” he asked the Negro.
Without looking away from his paper, the man reached in his pocket and handed him a packet of matches.
“Thanks,” Julian said. For a moment he held the matches foolishly. A NO SMOKING sign looked down upon him from over the door. This alone would not have deterred him; he had no cigarettes. He had quit smoking some months before because he could not afford it. “Sorry,” he muttered and handed back the matches. The Negro lowered the paper and gave him an annoyed look. He took the matches and raised the paper again.
His mother continued to gaze at him but she did not take advantage of his momentary discomfort. Her eyes retained their battered look. Her face seemed to be unnaturally red, as if her blood pressure had risen. Julian allowed no glimmer of sympathy to show on his face. Having got the advantage, he wanted desperately to keep it and carry it through. He would have liked to teach her a lesson that would last her a while, but there seemed no way to continue the point. The Negro refused to come out from behind his paper.
Julian folded his arms and looked stolidly before him, facing her but as if he did not see her, as if he had ceased to recognize her existence. He visualized a scene in which, the bus having reached their stop, he would remain in his seat and when she said, “Aren’t you going to get off?” he would look at her as at a stranger who had rashly addressed him. The corner they got off on was usually deserted, but it was well lighted and it would not hurt her to walk by herself the four blocks to the Y. He decided to wait until the time came and then decide whether or not he would let her get off by herself. He would have to be at the Y at ten to bring her back, but he could leave her wondering if he was going to show up. There was no reason for her to think she could always depend on him.
He retired again into the high-ceilinged room sparsely settled with large pieces of antique furniture. His soul expanded momentarily but then he became aware of his mother across from him and the vision shriveled. He studied her coldly. Her feet in little pumps dangled like a child’s and did not quite reach the floor. She was training on him an exaggerated look of reproach. He felt completely detached from her. At that moment he could with pleasure have slapped her as he would have slapped a particularly obnoxious child in his charge.
He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which he could teach her a lesson. He might make friends with some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to spend the evening. He would be entirely justified but her blood pressure would rise to 300. He could not push her to the extent of making her have a stroke, and moreover, he had never been successful at making any Negro friends. He had tried to strike up an acquaintance on the bus with some of the better types, with ones that looked like professors or ministers or lawyers. One morning he had sat down next to a distinguished-looking dark brown man who had answered his questions with a sonorous solemnity but who had turned out to be an undertaker. Another day he had sat down beside a cigar-smoking Negro with a diamond ring on his finger, but after a few stilted pleasantries, the Negro had rung the buzzer and risen, slipping two lottery tickets into Julian’s hand as he climbed over him to leave.
He imagined his mother lying desperately ill and his being able to secure only a Negro doctor for her. He toyed with that idea for a few minutes and then dropped it for a momentary vision of himself participating as a sympathizer in a sit-in demonstration. This was possible but he did not linger with it. Instead, he approached the ultimate horror. He brought home a beautiful suspiciously Negroid woman. Prepare yourself, he said. There is nothing you can do about it. This is the woman I’ve chosen. She’s intelligent, dignified, even good, and she’s suffered and she hasn’t thought it fun. Now persecute us, go ahead and persecute us. Drive her out of here, but remember, you’re driving me too. His eyes were narrowed and through the indignation he had generated, he saw his mother across the aisle, purple-faced, shrunken to the dwarf-like proportions of her moral nature, sitting like a mummy beneath the ridiculous banner of her hat.
He was tilted out of his fantasy again as the bus stopped. The door opened with a sucking hiss and out of the dark a large, gaily dressed, sullen-looking colored woman got on with a little boy. The child, who might have been four, had on a short plaid suit and a Tyrolean hat with a blue feather in it. Julian hoped that he would sit down beside him and that the woman would push in beside his mother. He could think of no better arrangement.
As she waited for her tokens, the woman was surveying the seating possibilities—he hoped with the idea of sitting where she was least wanted. There was something familiar looking about her but Julian could not place what it was. She was a giant of a woman. Her face was set not only to meet opposition but to seek it out. The downward tilt of her large lower lip was like a warning sign: DON’T TAMPER WITH ME. Her bulging figure was encased in a green crepe dress and her feet overflowed in red shoes. She had on a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. She carried a mammoth red pocketbook that bulged throughout as if it were stuffed with rocks.
To Julian’s disappointment, the little boy climbed up on the empty seat beside his mother. His mother lumped all children, black and white, into the common category, “cute,” and she thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter than little white children. She smiled at the little boy as he climbed on the seat.
Meanwhile the woman was bearing down upon the empty seat beside Julian. To his annoyance, she squeezed herself into it. He saw his mother’s face change as the woman settled herself next to him and he realized with satisfaction that this was more objectionable to her than it was to him. Her face seemed almost gray and there was a look of dull recognition in her eyes, as if suddenly she had sickened at some awful confrontation. Julian saw that it was because she and the woman had, in a sense, swapped sons. Though his mother would not realize the symbolic significance of this, she would feel it. His amusement showed plainly on his face.
The woman next to him muttered something unintelligible to herself. He was conscious of a kind of bristling next to him, a muted growling like that of an angry cat. He could not see anything but the red pocketbook upright on the bulging green thighs. He visualized the woman as she had stood waiting for her tokens—the ponderous figure, rising from the red shoes upward over the solid hips, the mammoth bosom, the haughty face, to the green and purple hat.
His eyes widened.
The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him with the radiance of a brilliant sunrise. His face was suddenly lit with joy. He could not believe that Fate had thrust upon his mother such a lesson. He gave a loud chuckle so that she would look at him and see that he saw. She turned her eyes on him slowly. The blue in them seemed to have turned a bruised purple. For a moment he had an uncomfortable sense of her innocence, but it lasted only a second before principle rescued him. Justice entitled him to laugh. His grin hardened until it said to her as plainly as if he were saying aloud: Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you a permanent lesson.
Her eyes shifted to the woman. She seemed unable to bear looking at him and to find the woman preferable. He became conscious again of the bristling presence at his side. The woman was rumbling like a volcano about to become active. His mother’s mouth began to twitch slightly at one corner. With a sinking heart, he saw incipient signs of recovery on her face and realized that this was going to strike her suddenly as funny and was going to be no lesson at all. She kept her eyes on the woman and an amused smile came over her face as if the woman were a monkey that had stolen her hat. The little Negro was looking up at her with large fascinated eyes. He had been trying to attract her attention for some time.
“Carver!” the woman said suddenly. “Come heah”
When he saw that the spotlight was on him at last, Carver drew his feet up and turned himself toward Julian’s mother and giggled.
“Carver!” the woman said. “You heah me? Come heah!”
Carver slid down from the seat but remained squatting with his back against the base of it, his head turned slyly around toward Julian’s mother, who was smiling at him. The woman reached a hand across the aisle and snatched him to her. He righted himself and hung backwards on her knees, grinning at Julian’s mother. “Isn’t he cute?” Julian’s mother said to the woman with the protruding teeth.
“I reckon he is,” the woman said without conviction.
The Negress yanked him upright but he eased out of her grip and shot across the aisle and scrambled, giggling wildly, onto the seat beside his love.
“I think he likes me,” Julian’s mother said, and smiled at the woman. It was the smile she used when she was being particularly gracious to an inferior. Julian saw everything lost. The lesson had rolled off her like rain on a roof.
The woman stood up and yanked the little boy off the seat as if she were snatching him from contagion. Julian could feel the rage in her at having no weapon like his mother’s smile. She gave the child a sharp slap across his leg. He howled once and then thrust his head into her stomach and kicked his feet against her shins. “Be-have,” she said vehemently.
The bus stopped and the Negro who had been reading the newspaper got off. The woman moved over and set the little boy down with a thump between herself and Julian. She held him firmly by the knee. In a moment he put his hands in front of his face and peeped at Julian’s mother through his fingers.
“I see yoooooooo!” she said and put her hand in front of her face and peeped at him.
The woman slapped his hand down. “Quit yo’ foolishness,” she said, “before I knock the living Jesus out of you!”
Julian was thankful that the next stop was theirs. He reached up and pulled the cord. The woman reached up and pulled it at the same time. Oh my God, he thought. He had the terrible intuition that when they got off the bus together, his mother would open her purse and give the little boy a nickel. The gesture would be as natural to her as breathing. The bus stopped and the woman got up and lunged to the front, dragging the child, who wished to stay on, after her. Julian and his mother got up and followed. As they neared the door, Julian tried to relieve her of her pocketbook.
“No,” she murmured, “I want to give the little boy a nickel.”
“No!” Julian hissed. “No!”
She smiled down at the child and opened her bag. The bus door opened and the woman picked him up by the arm and descended with him, hanging at her hip. Once in the street she set him down and shook him.
Julian’s mother had to close her purse while she got down the bus step but as soon as her feet were on the ground, she opened it again and began to rummage inside. “I can’t find but a penny,” she whispered, “but it looks like a new one.”
“Don’t do it!” Julian said fiercely between his teeth. There was a streetlight on the corner and she hurried to get under it so that she could better see into her pocketbook. The woman was heading off rapidly down the street with the child still hanging backward on her hand.
“Oh little boy!” Julian’s mother called and took a few quick steps and caught up with them just beyond the lamppost. “Here’s a bright new penny for you,” and she held out the coin, which shone bronze in the dim light.
The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her shoulders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage, and stared at Julian’s mother. Then all at once she seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the woman shout, “He don’t take nobody’s pennies!” When he opened his eyes, the woman was disappearing down the street with the little boy staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. Julian’s mother was sitting on the sidewalk.
“I told you not to do that,” Julian said angrily. “I told you not to do that!”
He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth. Her legs were stretched out in front of her and her hat was on her lap. He squatted down and looked her in the face. It was totally expressionless. “You got exactly what you deserved,” he said. “Now get up.”
He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen out back in it. He picked the hat up off her lap. The penny caught his eye on the sidewalk and he picked that up and let it drop before her eyes into the purse. Then he stood up and leaned over and held his hands out to pull her up. She remained immobile. He sighed. Rising above them on either side were black apartment buildings, marked with irregular rectangles of light. At the end of the block a man came out of a door and walked off in the opposite direction. “AM right,” he said, “suppose somebody happens by and wants to know why you’re sitting on the sidewalk?”
She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily up on it and then stood for a moment, swaying slightly as if the spots of light in the darkness were circling around her. Her eyes, shadowed and confused, finally settled on his face. He did not try to conceal his irritation. “I hope this teaches you a lesson,” he said. She leaned forward and her eyes raked his face. She seemed trying to determine his identity. Then, as if she found nothing familiar about him, she started off with a headlong movement in the wrong direction.
“Aren’t you going on to the Y?” he asked.
“Home,” she muttered.
“Well, are we walking?”
For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his hands behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning. She might as well be made to understand what had happened to her. “Don’t think that was just an uppity Negro woman,” he said. “That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. What, all this means,” he said, “is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.” He thought bitterly of the house that had been lost for him. “You aren’t who you think you are,” he said.
She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to him. Her hair had come undone on one side. She dropped her pocketbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked it up and handed it to her but she did not take it.
“You needn’t act as if the world had come to an end,” he said, “because it hasn’t. From now on you’ve got to live in a new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck up,” he said, “it won’t kill you.”
She was breathing fast.
“Let’s wait on the bus,” he said.
“Home,” she said thickly.
“I hate to see you behave like this,” he said. “Just like a child. I should be able to expect more of you.” He decided to stop where he was and make her stop and wait for a bus. “I’m not going any farther,” he said, stopping. “We’re going on the bus.”
She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He took a few steps and caught her arm and stopped her. He looked into her face and caught his breath. He was looking into a face he had never seen before. “Tell Grandpa to come get me,” she said.
He stared, stricken.
“Tell Caroline to come get me,” she said.
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
The Partridge Festival (1961)
CALHOUN parked his small pod-shaped car in the driveway to his great-aunts’ house and got out cautiously, looking to the right and left as if he expected the profusion of azalea blossoms to have a lethal effect upon him. Instead of a decent lawn, the old ladies had three terraces crammed with red and white azaleas, beginning at the sidewalk and running backwards to the very edge of their imposing unpainted house. The two of them were on the front porch, one sitting, the other standing.
“Here’s our baby;” his Aunt Bessie intoned in a voice meant to reach the other one, two feet away but deaf. It turned the head of a girl in the next yard, who sat crosslegged under a tree, reading. She raised her spectacled face, stared at Calhoun, and then returned her attention—with what he saw plainly was a smirk—to the book. Scowling, he passed stolidly on to the porch to get over the preliminaries with his aunts. They would take his voluntary presence in Partridge at Azalea Festival time to be a sign that his character was improving.
They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back. After each had embraced him, he dropped limply into a rocker and gave them a sheepish smile. He was here only because Singleton had captured his imagination, but he had told his Aunt Bessie over the telephone that he was coming to enjoy the festival.
The deaf one, Aunt Mattie, shouted, “Your greatgrandfather would have been delighted to see you taking an interest in the festival, Calhoun. He initiated it himself, you know.”
“Well,” the boy yelled back, “what about the little extra excitement you’ve had this time?”
Ten days before the festival began, a man named Singleton had been tried by a mock court on the courthouse lawn for not buying an Azalea Festival Badge. During the trial he had been imprisoned in a pair of stocks and when convicted, he had been locked in the “jail” together with a goat that had been tried and convicted previously for the same offense. The “jail” was an outdoor privy borrowed for the occasion by the Jaycees. Ten days later, Singleton had appeared in a side door on the courthouse porch and with a silent automatic pistol, had shot five of the dignitaries seated there and by mistake one person in the crowd. The innocent man received the bullet intended for the mayor who at that moment had reached down to pull up the tongue of his shoe.
“An unfortunate incident,” his Aunt Mattie said. “It mars the festive spirit.”
He heard the girl on the other lawn slam her book. The top of her rose into view above the hedge—a sloping-forward neck and a small face with a fierce expression, which she trained briefly on them before she disappeared. “It doesn’t seem to have marred anything,” he said. “As I passed through town I saw more people than ever before and all the flags were up. Partridge,” he shouted, “will bury its dead but will not lose a nickel.” The girl’s front door slammed in the middle of the sentence.
His Aunt Bessie had gone into the house and come out again with a small leather box. “You look very like Father,” she said and pulled up her chair beside him.
Without enthusiasm Calhoun opened the box, which shed a rustcolored dust over his knees, and removed the miniature of his greatgrandfather. He was shown this every time he came. The old man—round-faced, bald, altogether unremarkable-looking—sat with his hands knotted on the head of a black stick. His expression was all innocence and determination. The master merchant, the boy thought, and flinched. “And what would this stalwart worthy think of Partridge today,” he asked wryly, “with its festival in full swing after six citizens have been shot?”
“Father was progressive,” his Aunt Bessie said,”—the most forward-looking merchant Partridge ever had. He would either have been one of the prominent men shot or he would have been the one to subdue the maniac.”
The boy did not know how much of this he could stand. In the paper there had been pictures of the six “victims” and one of Singleton. Singleton’s was the only distinctive face in the lot. It was broad but bony and bleak. One eye was more nearly round than the other and in the more nearly round one Calhoun had recognized the composure of the man who knows he will and who is willing to suffer for the right to be himself. A calculating contempt lurked in the regular eye but in the general expression there was the tortured look of the man who becomes maddened finally by the madness around him. The other six faces were of the same general stamp as his greatgrandfather’s.
“As you get older, you’ll look more and more like Father,” his Aunt Mattie prophesied. “You have his ruddy complexion and much the same expression.”
“I’m a different type entirely,” he said stiffly.
“Peaches and cream,” his Aunt Bessie guffawed. “You’re getting a little pot-tummy too,” she said and took a lunge at his middle with her fist. “How old is our baby now?”
“Twenty-three,” he muttered, thinking that it could not go on like this for the whole visit, that once they had roughed him up a bit, they would leave off.
“And do you have a girl?” his Aunt Mattie asked.
“No,” he said wearily. “I take it,” he went on, “that around here Singleton is considered nothing but a mental case?”
“Yes,” his Aunt Bessie said,”—peculiar. He never conformed. He was not like the rest of us here.”
“A terrible drawback,” the boy said. Though his eyes were not mismatched, the shape of his face was broad like Singleton’s; but the real likeness between them was interior.
“Since he is insane, he is not responsible,” his Aunt Bessie said. The boy’s eyes brightened. He sat forward and fixed the old lady with a narrow gaze. “And where then,” he asked, “does the real guilt lie?”
“Father’s head was as smooth as an infant’s by the time he was thirty,” she said. “You had better hurry and get you a girl. Ha ha, What are you going to do with yourself now;”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew Ls pipe and a sack of tobacco. You could not ask them questions in depth. They were both good low-church Episcopalians but they had amoral imaginations. “I think I shall write,” he said and began to load the bowl.
“Well,” his Aunt Bessie said, “that’s fine. Maybe you’ll be another Margaret MitchelL”
“I hope you’ll do us justice,” his Aunt Mattie shouted. “Few do.”
“I’ll do you justice all right,” he said grimly. “I’m writing an expos…” He stopped and put the pipe in his mouth and sat back. It would be ridiculous to tell them. He removed the pipe and said, “Well, that’s too much to go into. It wouldn’t interest you ladies.”
His Aunt Bessie inclined her head significantly. “Calhoun,” she said, “we wouldn’t want to be disappointed in you.” They eyed him as if it had just occurred to them that the pet snake they had been fondling might after all be poisonous.
“Know the truth,” the boy said with his fiercest look, “and the truth shall make you free.”
They appeared reassured at his quoting Scripture. “Isn’t he sweet,” his Aunt Mattie asked, “with his little pipe?”
“Better get you a girl, boy,” his Aunt Bessie said.
He escaped them in a few minutes and took his bag upstairs and then came down again, ready to go out and immerse himself in his material. His intention was to spend the afternoon interviewing people about Singleton. He expected to write something that would vindicate the madman and he expected the writing of it to mitigate his own guilt, for his doubleness, his shadow, was cast before him more darkly than usual in the light of Singleton’s purity.
For the three summer months of the year, he lived with his parents and sold air-conditioners, boats, and refrigerators so that for the other nine months he could afford to meet life naturally and bring his real self—the rebel-artist-mystic-to birth. During these other months he lived on the opposite side of the city in an unheated walk-up with two other boys who also did nothing. But guilt for the summer pursued him into the winter; the fact was, he could have fared without the orgy of selling he cast himself into in the summer.
When he had explained to them that he despised their values, his parents had looked at each other with a gleam of recognition as if this were what they had been expecting from what they had read, and his father had offered to give him a small allowance to finance the flat. He had refused it for the sake of his independence, but in the depths of himself, he knew it was not for his independence but because he enjoyed selling. In the face of a customer, he was carried outside himself; his face began to beam and sweat and all complexity left him; he was in the grip of a drive as strong as the drive of some men for liquor or a woman; and he was horribly good at it. He was so good at it that the company had given him an achievement scroll. He had put quotation marks around the word achievement and he and his friends used the scroll as a target for darts.
As soon as he had seen Singleton’s picture in the paper, the face began to burn in his imagination like a dark reproachful liberating star. The next morning he had telephoned his aunts to expect him and he had driven the hundred and fifty miles to Partridge in a little short of four hours.
On his way out of the house, his Aunt Bessie halted him and said, “Be back by six, Baby Lamb, and we’ll have a sweet surprise for you.”
“Rice pudding?” he asked. They were terrible cooks.
“Sweeter by far!” the old lady said and rolled her eyes. He hastened away.
The girl next door had returned with her book to the lawn. He suspected that he might be supposed to know her. When he came for visits as a child, his aunts had always produced one of the neighbor’s freak children to play with him—once a fat moron in a Girl Scout suit, another time a near-sighted boy who recited Bible verses, and another an almost square girl who had blackened his eye and left. He thanked God he was now grown and they would no longer dare to fill his time for him. The girl did not look up as he passed and he did not speak.
Once on the sidewalk, he was affected by the profusion of azaleas. They seemed to wash in tides of color across the lawns until they surged against the white house-fronts, crests of pink and crimson, crests of white and a mysterious shade that was not yet lavender, wild crests of yellow-red. The profusion of color almost stopped his breath with insidious pleasure. Moss hung from the old trees. The houses were the most picturesque types of rundown ante-bellum. The taint of the place was expressed in his greatgrandfather’s words which had survived as the town’s motto: Beauty is Our Money Crop.
His aunts lived five blocks from the business section. He walked them quickly and came after a few minutes to the edge of the bare commercial scene, which had the ramshackle courthouse for its center. The sun beat down fiercely on the tops of cars parked in every available space. Flags, national, state and confederate, flapped on every corner street light. People milled about. On the quiet shaded street where his aunts lived and the azaleas were best, he had not passed three people, but here they all were, staring avidly at the pathetic store displays and moving with languid reverence past the courthouse porch, the spot where blood had been spilled. He wondered if any of them might think he was here for the same reason they were. He would have liked to start, in Socratic fashion, a street discussion about where the real guilt for the six deaths lay, but as he surveyed the scene, he saw no one who looked capable of any genuine interest in meaning. Without set purpose, he entered a drugstore. The place was dark and smelled of sour vanilla.
He sat down on the high stool at the counter and ordered a limeade. The boy preparing the drink had elaborate red sideburns and wore on his shirtfront an Azalea Festival Badge—the emblem which Singleton had refused to buy. Calhoun’s eye fell on it at once. “I see you’ve paid your tribute to the god,” he said.
The boy did not seem to get the significance of this.
“The badge,” Calhoun said, “the badge.”
The boy looked down at it and then back at Calhoun. He put the drink on the counter and continued to look at him as if he were serving someone with an interesting deformity.
“Are you enjoying the festive spirit?” Calhoun asked.
“All these doings?” the boy said.
“These grand events,” Calhoun said, “commencing with, I believe, six deaths.”
“Yessir,” the boy said, “six in cold blood. And I knew four of them myself.”
“You too have had your share of the glory then,” Calhoun said. He felt suddenly a distinct hush fall on the street outside. He turned his eyes to the door just in time to see a hearse pass, followed by a line of slowly moving cars.
“That’s the man that’s having his funeral to himself,” the boy said reverently. “The five that were supposed to get shot had theirs yesterday. One big one. But he didn’t die in time for it.”
“They have innocent as well as guilty blood on their hands,”
Calhoun said and glared at the boy.
“It wasn’t no they,” the boy said. “One man done it all. A man named Singleton. He was bats.”
“Singleton was only the instrument,” Calhoun said. “Partridge itself is guilty.” He finished his drink in a gulp and put down the glass.
The boy was looking at him as if he were mad. “Patridge can’t shoot nobody,” he said in a high exasperated voice.
Calhoun put his dime on the counter and left. The last car had turned at the end of the block. He thought he observed less activity. People had obviously hastened away at the sight of the hearse. Two doors from him an old man leaned out of a hardware store and glared up the street where the procession had disappeared. Calhoun’s need to communicate was urgent. He approached diffidently. “I understand that was the last funeral,” he said.
The old man put a hand behind his ear.
“The funeral of the innocent man,” Calhoun shouted and nodded up the street.
The old man cleared his nostrils loudly. His expression was not affable. “The only bullet that went right,” he said in a rasping voice. “Biller was a wastrel. Drunk at the time.”
The boy scowled. “I suppose the other five were heroes?” he suggested archly.
“Fine men,” the old man said. “Perished in the line of duty. We givem a hero’s fu’nel—all five in one big service. Biller’s folks tried to rush up the undertaker so they could get Biller in on it but we saw to it Biller didn’t make it. Would have been a disgrace.”
My God, the boy thought.
“The only thing Singleton ever did good was to rid us of Biller,” the old man continued. “Now somebody ought to rid us of Singleton. There he is at Quincy, living in the laper luxury, laying in a cool bed at no expense, eating up your taxes and mine. They should have shot him on the spot.”
This was so appalling that Calhoun was speechless.
“Going to keep him there, they ought to charge him board,” the old man said.
With a contemptuous glance, the boy walked off. He crossed the street to the courthouse square, moving at an odd angle in order to put as much distance between himself and the old fool as quickly as possible. Here benches were scattered beneath the trees. He found an unoccupied one and sat down. To the side of the courthouse steps, several viewers stood admiring the “jail” where Singleton had been locked with the goat. The pathos of his friend’s situation was borne in on him with a rush of empathy. He felt himself flung in the privy, the padlock clicked, he glared between the rotting planks at the fools howling and cavorting outside. The goat made an obscene noise; he saw that he was confined with the spirit of the community.
“Six men was shot here,” an odd muffled voice close by said.
The boy jumped.
A small white girl whose tongue was curled in the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle was sitting in a patch of sand at his feet, watching him with a detached gaze. Her eyes were the same green as the bottle. She was barefooted and had straight white hair. She withdrew her tongue from the bottle with an explosive sound. “A bad man did it,” she said.
The boy felt the kind of frustration that accompanies contact with the certainty of children. “No,” he said, “he was not a bad man.”
The child put her tongue back in the bottle and withdrew it silently, her eyes on him.
“People were not good to him,” he explained. “They were mean to him. They were cruel. What would you do if someone were cruel to you?”
“Shoot them,” she said.
“Well, that’s what he did,” Calhoun said, frowning.
She continued to sit there and did not take her eyes off him. Her gaze might have been the depthless gaze of Partridge itself.
“You people persecuted him and finally drove him mad,” the boy said. “He wouldn’t buy a badge. Was that a crime? He was the Outsider here and you couldn’t stand that. One of the fundamental rights of man,” he said, glaring through the child’s transparent stare, “is the right not to behave like a fool. The right to be different,” he said hoarsely, “My God. The right to be yourself.”
Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted one of her feet and set it on her knee.
“He was a bad bad bad man,” she said.
Calhoun got up and walked off, glaring In front of him. His indignation swathed his vision in a kind of haze. He saw none of the activity around him distinctly. Two high school girls in bright skirts and jackets swung into his path and shrilled, “Buy a ticket for the beauty contest tonight. See who’ll be Miss Partridge Azalea!” He swerved sharply to the side and did not throw them so much as a glance. Their giggles followed him until he was past the courthouse and onto the block behind it. He stood there a moment, undecided what he would do next. He faced a barber shop which looked empty and cool. After a moment he entered it.
The barber, alone in the shop, raised his head from behind the paper he was reading. Calhoun asked for a haircut and sat down gratefully in the chair. The barber was a tall emaciated fellow with eyes that might have faded from some deeper color. He looked to be a man who had suffered himself. He put the bib on the boy and stood staring at his round head as if it were a pumpkin he was wondering how to slice. Then he twirled the chair so that Calhoun faced the mirror. He was confronted with an image that was round-faced, unremarkablelooking and innocent. The boy’s expression turned fierce. “Are you eating up this slop like the rest of them?” he asked belligerently.
“Come again?” the barber said.
“Do the tribal rites going on here improve the barber trade? All these doings, all these doings,” he said impatiently.
“Well,” the barber said, “last year it was a thousand extra people here and this year it looks to be more—on account,” he said, “of the tragedy.”
“The tragedy,” the boy repeated and stretched his mouth.
“The six that was shot,” the barber said.
“That tragedy,” the boy said. “And what about the other tragedy—the man who was persecuted by these idiots until he shot six of them?”
“Oh him,” the barber said.
“Singleton,” the boy said. “Did he patronize your place?”
The barber began clipping his hair. A peculiar expression of disdain had come over his face at the mention of the name. “Tonight it’s a beauty contest,” he said, “tomorrow night it’s a band concert, Thursday afternoon it’s a big parade with Miss…”
“Did you or didn’t you know Singleton?” Calhoun interrupted.
“Known him well,” the barber said and shut his mouth.
A tremor went through the boy as he realized that Singleton had probably sat in the chair he himself was now sitting in. He searched his face in the mirror desperately for its hidden likeness to the man. Slowly he saw it appear, a secret message brought to light by the heat of his feelings. “Did he patronize your shop?” he asked and held his breath for the answer.
“Him and me was related by marriage,” the barber said indignantly, “but he never come in here. He was too big a skinflint to have his hair cut. He cut his own.”
“An unpardonable crime,” Calhoun said in a high voice.
“His second cousin married my sister-in-law,” the barber said, “but he never known me on the street. Pass him as close as I am to you and he’d keep going. Kept his eye on the ground all the time like he was following a bug.”
“Preoccupied,” the boy muttered. “He doubtless didn’t know you were on the street.”
“He known it,” the barber said and his mouth curled unpleasantly. “He known it. I clip hair and he clipped coupons and that was that. I clip hair,” he repeated as if this sentence had a particularly satisfying ring to his ears, “and he clipped coupons.”
The typical have-not psychology, Calhoun thought. “Was the Singleton family once wealthy?” he asked.
“It wasn’t but half of him Singleton,” the barber said, “and the Singleton’s claimed there wasn’t none of him Singleton. One of the Singleton girls gone off on a nine-months vacation and come back with him. Then they all died off and left him their money. It’s no telling what the other half of him is. Something foreign I would judge.” His tone insinuated more.
“I begin to get the picture,” Calhoun said.
“He ain’t clipping no coupons now,” said the barber.
“No,” Calhoun said and his voice rose, “now he’s suffering. He’s the scapegoat. He’s laden with the sins of the community. Sacrificed for the guilt of o
Review
“What we lost when she died is bitter. What we have is astonishing: the stories burn brighter than ever, and strike deeper.” –Walter Clemons, Newsweek
— Review
Product Description
Winner of the National Book Award
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O’Connor’s monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O’Connor put together in her short lifetime–_Everything That Rises Must Converge _and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
O’Connor published her first story, “The Geranium,” in 1946, while she was working on her master’s degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, “Judgement Day”–sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of “The Geranium.” Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O’Connor’s longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.