Then the promise of some kind of freedom lured these children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and neighbors to the big-city ghettos. The government came and took away the maimed and infirm to what they promised was a better life. By Christmas Eve of Clark’s thirteenth year Leola’s house is the colored section—she is the only black person left under Strang Knob, her house the only house on Cornbread Alley where the census taker troubles to knock.
It is a tumbledown house, which white folks comfortably call a disgrace. An aluminum ladder missing most of its rungs angles across its gabled roof. In winter its windows trail tattered plastic that Leola staples to the frames for insulation. The yard is packed bare and strewn with other people’s trash (the shell of a 1939 Ford, the mangle from a wringer washer), that white people bring and dump here under the assumption that the poorest poor are most adept at making silk from sow’s ears. The house has weathered to the color of the limestone cliff against which it crouches. As Clark and Tom Hardin cross the yard a half-feral sow casts a malevolent eye from a hole in the planks that skirt the crawl space below the porch.
Inside, Leola is ironing. Great folds of flesh hang at her cheeks, her legs are two thick pilings supporting her bulk—later Rose Ella will tell Clark that she suffers from some disorder of the glands. She wears sheer nylons rolled at the knee and a shapeless dress of some coarse black fabric, with another nylon pulled over her grizzled hair as a cap. At her side she keeps a Mason jar, holes punched in its tin lid, filled with water with which she sprinkles each shirt before its pressing. She smells frankly of winter weeks without hot water.
Gaspard sits at the table nearby, rail-thin, a dog-eared game of solitaire spread out before him. His face is as seamed and wrinkled as the shirts Leola pulls from the laundry basket. His cheeks are grizzled—“the white blood in him, that makes those whiskers,” Tom Hardin told Clark this on the drive from the Hardin house—but above these his cheekbones slash forward sharp and chiseled as arrowheads. His eyes sit deep in their sockets, his forehead is a map of some broad and furrowed field. Clark has known Leola and Gaspard all his life, but always he has encountered them on his turf, as visitors in his life, and he has never before noticed who they are, which is to say who he himself is. Now he sees for the first time how his own features, his family’s features, belong to his immigrant forebears—their broad, blank foreheads, their wide-spaced eyes, their strong chins of some Scottish Highland people squared and set for generations against any kind of revelation of what might lie underneath. Gaspard and Leola—they are homely, there is no denying this, but their faces are like mountain ranges, raised and folded and creased, the living manifestation of the forces at work within. It is all Clark can do not to stare. What would bring faces to look like these?
Tom Hardin places one basket on the table. Clark places the other at Gaspard’s feet and hands Leola the packet of ironing from his mother. From deep in his hunting jacket Tom Hardin pulls a pint of white dog. Leola sets her iron aside—Clark recognizes it from its first life under Rose Ella’s hands; she’d passed it on when she bought one of the newfangled kind that make their own steam.
Leola pulls up a chair for Tom Hardin, overturns a wooden crate for Clark, circles these around the wood-burning stove, welded from an empty oil barrel and some excess stove pipe—Tom Hardin has been at work here. From a cabinet Leola produces three empty peanut butter jars scrubbed clean. “Your counting’s falling off,” Tom Hardin says, and Leola returns to the cabinet to scrabble around until she finds a fourth jar. Tom Hardin pours two fingers of dog in each glass. He hands these around, giving the last to Clark. It is the first time his father has offered him a drink.
Clark puts the glass to his nose. Underneath the pungent, sinus-clearing dog he smells a faint whiff of Skippy. Leola takes up her glass, then her iron. They wade into the winter afternoon as if it were a warm and shallow summer-comfort lake.
The past is what they talk about. Leola remembers someone who is dead, or gone to the city—the same state of being to her, since the city, a place she has heard about but never been, is no more or less real to her than the realms of the dead—heaven, hell, purgatory; limbo, where so many of her babies now reside. Her surviving children are all gone, to the ghetto, to be soldiers (her oldest great-grandchild has just been shipped to some distant, war-struck place), to the pen (several of her sons are serving time at La Grange).
All these years of caretaking and now she is alone with her ironing. There is less work for her under Strang Knob—the white folks’ children are growing up and leaving, too, and the younger mothers are buying fancy steam irons. But she has only her own mouth to feed now and she gets along. She is good at getting along.
Leola pours forth a story, a slow-flowing river of words that rolls and tumbles on, about a brother of hers killed in the thirties, the slim years, when he jumped from a cliff onto a moving coal car, so as to toss chunks of coal onto the railbed for people to gather. On this day something went wrong—he misjudged the speed of the car? Struck his head while jumping? Leola’s neighbors claimed a train guard chased him down and threw him from the railroad bridge. However it happened, the next day they found the boy floating in the river, hung on a snag beneath the railroad trestle, hardly a mark on his body for all his trouble.
After a respectful pause Tom Hardin follows with his version of the same story, which includes some gentle correction of Leola—Tom Hardin having been during those same years an employee of the railroad.
The story is sensitive—Clark feels that sharpness about the edges of words that signals a forthcoming change in the topic of conversation. And after a while Leola begins to talk of the young pictureman who came to town long ago, Miss Camilla’s father, who took Leola’s mother’s washing money and her picture and then left town, never to return with the pictures they’d paid for and he’d taken.
Tom Hardin laughs at this old story. “He probably never bothered to load the camera,” he says.
As for Gaspard, he does not talk much but offers choral commentary. “He ought never have taken those pictures, if he had no intention of getting them back to their rightful owners.” “She ought never have gone chasing after him, if she wasn’t going to bring the baby back here and provide her a home.”
Four fingers of dog and Tom Hardin will talk about his sons. “Education,” he says.
“That boy goes to school.”
“They’s all his children gone to school. Even the girls.”
“Every one of those boys you’ll see in a cap and gown. It’ll happen. As for the girls—they’re Rose Ella’s affair. But I’ve gone along, I’ll keep on going along. Up to the point where they start learning too much for their own good.”
“What they don’t teach in school it don’t do them no good to learn.” Leola shakes her iron. “You want they should learn how to use this?”
“Damn right.”
“Huh. You won’t find them boys working in a ’stillery.”
“That’s all right”—this from Gaspard—“’cept who’s to bring us dog at Christmas?”
“They’ll be somebody,” Tom Hardin says. “They’ll always be a Hardin. You listen to me: Some things never change. You think they’ll ever come a time when people stop drinking whiskey? And as long as they’re drinking it somebody will make it, and as long as somebody’s making it they’ll be a Hardin to tap into it and bring you some.”
“Tain’t nobody else got the heart to bother”—Leola, at the ironing board.
Tom Hardin laughs. “Ain’t nobody else got the key. And I can take care of that.” He slaps Clark on the shoulder. “You hear me say it now. One of my boys is always going to know the ins and outs—one of my boys will bring you dog, as long as you’re here to drink it. One of my boys’ll see to it that you’re buried with your dog, if that’s what you want.”
“Then he’ll be prizin’ a empty bottle from my folded fingers,” Leola says. “Gaspard’ll have got to it before then.”
A few more
fingers of dog and they fall silent. The only sound is the low hum of the stove and the rasp of Leola’s iron across cotton. Surely now they will take their leave, Clark thinks, but the light fades from the windows and no one talks and they sit and sit, except for Leola, who irons. They are lost in memory, but Clark has not yet accumulated a memory in which to get lost and so he squirms and then rises from his crate to pace the room looking for something to look at. There is nothing to look at except years of the county newspaper with which Leola has insulated the walls, and so he reads these. First to himself, then, as the silence and his impatience grow, aloud. “Flood,” he reads.
“What flood?”
“March 27, 1953.”
“That was no flood,” Tom Hardin says with a reader’s satisfaction at unearthing error in print. “They were just needing a headline. Now the flood when I met your mother—that was a flood.”
“Mother told me you met her at a church social.”
“When I met your mother she was on a date with the man she was already signed up to marry,” Tom Hardin said. “They were at some fancy-dress party to raise money for the people who’d lost their houses in the flood. Some fool mistakenly provided me an invitation. I slipped a quarter to a colored boy to tell your mother’s date some guy was outside working over his car. By the time he got back I had talked her into leaving with me.” Tom Hardin closes his eyes. “You let that be a lesson to you when the time comes.”
Clark reads on. Weddings, births, football championships, homecoming queens. Then he comes across a prominently displayed article. “Garfield Wilson Accused of Murder,” he reads.
“I was the one what found Garfield Wilson sitting on his porch,” Leola says. “‘Morning, Leola,’ he says, just like it was any old ordinary day and I was coming to get the ironing, which is what I was doing. ‘How’s your wife,’ I ask. And he says, ‘’Sdead.’ And I says, ‘Dead?’ And he says, ‘Yep. Shot her.’ And I says, ‘With a gun?’—I knows with a gun, o’ course, but all of a sudden I feels her own self looking over his shoulder and him talking to me like it was the courthouse steps, only me right there out on the farm with nobody but him and myself and what was left of Miz Wilson. And he says, ‘Yep, I called the shurf and I’s sitting here waiting for him to come and hope they put me in the pen which I deserve and worse.’ And sure ’nough in a few minutes along come the shurf—they goes inside the house and gets her body—I never set foot inside that house, I couldn’t no way make myself do it, she wasn’t inside nohow but out there on the porch with him and me and I knows there was no way she could be outside with him and me and still be living in her own body and so I just wait for them to come and then stands there watching them take him and her away. And then the twelve-man jury goes and give him six year, and old man Judge Selkirk give him time off because they said his wife was a mean-hearted woman. My name is in that writing—people has told it to me as a fact. Read it to me,” she says, a command, and Clark reads aloud: Leola Ferber of Cornbread Alley told Sheriff Greenleaf she suspected trouble as she was approaching the house to take in laundry. ‘There was some kind of wrongness about the place,’ Leola speaks the words aloud as Clark reads them. She spits on her iron. “He’ll burn in hell if it comes to that,” she says. “Justice is the Lord’s.”
“She put herself in his way, Leola, you know that,” Tom Hardin says. “A man chooses his bed, or a woman, is what I say, and then it’s his, or hers, to lie in, and however lumpy they might find the mattress they can always up and leave.”
“Yes, sir, but Miz Wilson was long past choosing by the time I rolled up to that porch.”
“She could have up and left herself.”
“And you’ll tell me where she would go? You know she had three childrens and not a provider in sight unless it was Garfield Wilson, and him only when she could get him drunk enough to take right from his pocket.”
“She couldn’t have left that particular morning, maybe, but Garfield had been stone drunk for a month and not the first time he’d pulled that gun. You can’t tell me he hadn’t written out the handwriting on the wall. Plain as day for anybody that can read.”
“Plain as all that.” Leola takes up another shirt and spits on her iron again, biting her lips at its sizzle. “Reading the writing on the wall. Plain as all that.”
Eight fingers of dog and Tom Hardin will talk about politics, though Leola is not keen on the subject and Gaspard takes on the countenance of a stone. Tom Hardin rails, he is performing and they are his necessary and captive audience. “You look at what happened to Jack Kennedy,” he says. “You make your own bed, you lie in it.” Once in a while Leola shakes her head and murmurs soothing noises, but at her side the stack of pressed and folded shirts grows more rapidly. As for Gaspard, he drifts off, and it is his snoring that finally reins in Tom Hardin’s polemic horses. “Isn’t that right, Leola,” Tom Hardin says. Leola holds a shirt to the light and gives a little cluck of disgust. “No way I can send this back in this kind of shape.”
Tom Hardin excuses himself to take a leak on the hard-packed earth of the backyard. There is a wave of cold air as he opens and shuts the door, then the thrumming of his unloosed stream against the porch’s plank skirt. The warm, thick smell of urine seeps into the room. Clark shifts uncomfortably on his feet—this smell is so private, and from his father. The old man might at least step away from the house—he does this much at home, when he is working in his woodshop and can’t be bothered with running the family gauntlet to get to the inside bathroom.
Then this thing happens. Leola sets her iron upright on its metal stand and steps away from her ironing board. Bending a little at the knees, she takes the hem of her black bag of a dress in either hand—she might be a ballerina, poised for a deep bow as flowers land at her feet and applause rises around her like a flood. She lowers herself on trembly legs, then raises her skirt to her hips, her waist, higher. Clark stares. She wears nothing underneath. She is nothing if not massive, and at the center of her massive brown hips the single, lidded eye. Clark stares, and surely he imagines this—for the remainder of his life he will tell himself and no one else that he imagined this well in the middle of the bush, this omniscient, scandalous secret, grave and silent until it delivers a slow and majestic wink.
Clark darts a glance at Gaspard. His head is bowed to his game, he licks one deliberate thumb, transfers a card from one pile to its neighbor. Clark’s eyes will not rise to meet Leola’s, his consternation and terror are too great, but his absolute need to know gets the better of his fear and he forces himself to look up.
Her face is a mask, but her eyes, jaundiced and bloodshot, meet his own. Her eyes are joking and angry, mocking and fierce, and in them he sees this: She knows things about him that he himself is only beginning to learn. She knows, for example, that he, a good white boy, can say nothing of this to his father. Beyond that she knows a great deal more, that he is too young to understand. She knows more about him than he knows about himself.
Cold air at his back. Clark turns around. Tom Hardin is coming in the door. Clark turns back. Leola is at her iron. Gaspard turns over another card. “Shut your mouth, boy, the flies will get in,” Tom Hardin says.
By now the weak winter light has disappeared from the windows, and Clark, searching for an excuse to leave, walks to the door. “Father, if we don’t go we’ll miss dinner and mass both.”
“No great loss on either account,” Tom Hardin says, but he picks up his coat.
“Good thing he’s got a son to keep track,” Leola says.
“What’s a son for,” Tom Hardin says. He throws Clark the keys. “You’re getting us home.”
“But I don’t have a license.”
“You got your father’s permission. That’ll do. Merry Christmas, Leola. Merry Christmas, Gaspard.”
Leola sets her iron upright and waddles to the door. “Merry Christmas, Mister Hardin, and the same to Miz Hardin. Don’t you worry the usher to save a place for us in church.”
T
hey are in the car, Clark has started the engine and put it in gear when Tom Hardin lays a hand on his arm. “So tell me what you learned.”
Clark speaks from the two fingers of white dog, still warm in his blood. “I learned where my eyes come from.” Silence after this, until Clark says, “I mean, that they’re family eyes, come from the blood. From whoever we come from.”
“What else?”
Clark speaks carefully. “I learned something about Leola and Gaspard. Who they are. Where they fit in with the family.”
Tom Hardin sits back. “That’s something. That’s a place to begin.”
Clark is not lying—these are things he has learned, from seeing instead of just looking at Gaspard and Leola for the first time. And he learned, or at least he heard Tom Hardin say, that a man chooses his own bed to lie in; this is something he will think about.
As for what Leola did, or what he imagined she did—the thought of this is enough to bring forth in him the first swell of understanding that there are ways of being in this world for which no grownup will ever offer an explanation, things he will never be able to understand but can only accept. But this extraordinary knowledge is too huge and dangerous to be put into words and so he turns his thoughts to something safe, something he can put into words, and these are the words in his head, this is what he wonders as he drives his dozing father home: Who will bring dog to Leola and Gaspard after Tom Hardin is gone?
Cowboys
[1972]
Up and over Strang Knob, west from Kentucky, Raphael Hardin drives the family gift horse, a 1964 Rambler Rebel with cherry-red bucket seats, a black vinyl roof, Flash-o-matic floor shift, 115,000 miles on the odometer, and an affection for running hot. Riding in the passenger seat is Willy, a middle-aged German hitchhiker whom Raphael picked up west of St. Louis to help with driving and gas. Willy is too old to be hitchhiking, at the gas pump he claims an empty wallet, but Raphael is too exhilarated to care. He has never driven cross-country, he knows nothing of cars, but he is on his way to California to college, for the first time he is driving his own car, with a red-haired, radical European riding shotgun. Together they are crossing America, easy riders in the family sedan.
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