by Vin Packer
“I’m sick of you!” he had said. “I always was sick of your father, and now, finally, I’m sick of you! Is that clear enough for you?”
Then he had rolled over on his own side of the bed, and ten minutes later, commenced to snore.
Cassandra Chadwick did not cry herself to sleep after that, she pitied herself to sleep, curled into a fetal position beside him, but not touching him, she comforted one breast with her hand cupping it gently, and indulged in implacable brooding on the ironies of her plight that Friday night at the beginning of autumn.
There were many more in Bastrop besides herself who said the same thing she did about Chad’s attitude on the Supreme Court ruling, the only difference being she said it to Jack, and they said it behind his back.
Said — like Senior Porter — ”Trouble is, Jack’s not a businessman, so he doesn’t have to worry. But a merchant knows that whenever there’s tension between the Nigraw and the white in a town as small as this, it’s going to hurt business. And a merchant knows when a law like the school law is passed, it’s just better to shut up about it.”
Like Gus Chandler — ”Trouble is, Chadwick don’t work with niggers, don’t know what makes them black apes tick. Now most niggers wouldn’t ‘uv paid no goddam attention to that law; woulda kept right on riding the orange bus over to Morrow to learn their wool heads how to spell cotton, and we wouldn’t be violating the law none at all. But Chadwick’s reminding ‘em they don’t have to cart their asses fifteen miles back and forth every day, and all they need is a little reminding. Just remind a lazy nigger he don’t have to do something often enough, and pretty soon it sinks in that he don’t have to do something. Chad’s turned the Citizen into a goddam nigger memorandum!”
Like Arnold Belden — ”Trouble is Chad’s an outsider. He’s from a big city in the midwest, and we’re a small town in the Deep South. Integration is just another issue with him; with us, it’s a tradition; and only someone born and raised down here can appreciate how we feel about traditions. When they’re broken, we don’t feel like sitting down on the back porch and reading in the evening newspaper that that’s just the way the ball bounces sometimes, we better clap hands and grin.”
Cassandra Chadwick had been sitting over a soda in Porter Drugs last night telling her husband what people were saying, and the fact that she had had to wait so long before she could had made it seem all the more important. It was something of an occasion — a turning point, really, when instead of turning away from a point in their marriage, they returned to an original point. For during the last few weeks, Cass had felt Chad come back, after a stolid summer’s absence, when little things were magnified to giant proportions, and larger things minimized to seem of no importance at all. And they had grown apart from one another, not with the kind suddenness of a violent split, but in the more painful languid way which nagged and never burst.
She knew she could pinpoint the problem in two incidents, and in both matters she had been to blame; but in both, too, she had never been more herself. That was the wall between them.
• • •
The first had been at the beginning of June, out at the Legion picnic on the fairgrounds. It had been Jack’s idea to take Johnny-Bob with them instead of leaving him with Ginny; and it had been the first time Johnny-Bob had played with any other children than the Scott twins from next door, or the Gaynor girl from down the street. After they had spread their blanket behind the long picnic table, facing the sandpile and slides and swings, Chad had stood up, taken Johnny-Bob by the hand, and walked him over there. Johnny-Bob was three, with a face peppered with wild brown freckles and cut across with a wide grin, rust-colored hair sweeping his brow. Some of the children playing in the sandpile were about his age; others were older — six, seven and eight.
Cass watched Chad say hi to them; watched them look up and then look at Johnny-Bob, all grins still — and imitating his father.
“Hi!” he said.
They answered him — some of them. Some kept on with their holes and castles, ignoring him.
Cass heard Chad say, “Want to sit down, John? There’s sand there. There’s a sand pile.”
The child swung his hand free from Chad and squatted, touching the ground with his fingers, gradually sitting in the sand.
A small boy across from Johnny-Bob was watching carefully.
“Is there a pail?” Johnny-Bob asked.
“No, but you can dig a hole to China, can’t you?” Chad knelt and began to help him.
Then the small boy spoke up. “What’s wrong with him? Don’t he see nothin’?”
Chad said, “Johnny’s blind,” in a matter-of-fact tone, continuing with his digging. Johnny-Bob scooped out some sand and let his fingers sift it, laughing.
“No kidding,” the small boy said. “Can’t he see my hand?” He leaned over and waved it at Johnny-Bob’s face.
“Nope, he can’t,” Chad said.
By this time all the children were staring at Johnny-Bob; all had stopped what they were doing.
“Does he knew he’s blind?” one girl asked.
“He knows the word blind, but it’s hard for him to comprehend the meaning, because he never saw, like we do.”
Johnny-Bob kept on digging.
“I could help him with that hole,” the small boy said.
“See if he wants some,” Chad grinned.
The small boy hesitated; then he hopped over beside Johnny-Bob. “Want some help?”
“Sure,” Johnny-Bob answered, looked in the direction of the voice. Again the small boy waved his hand across his face, but Johnny-Bob looked away, back down at his digging. Then the boy put a tin shovel in his hand.
He said, “That’s a shovel.”
Someone from a swing nearby yelled at the boy, “Davis, c’mon and swing.”
Chad was standing now, starting to walk away. He told Johnny-Bob, “I’ll be right by. Give a holler if you want me, fellow.”
“Okay,” Johnny-Bob said.
Then the boy in the swing shouted again for Davis, and it all began.
Davis yelled, “Hey, c’mon and see the blind boy. He’s blind, Simpson!”
Chad was walking toward Cass leisurely, lighting his pipe.
Cass sat forward, clutching her pearls at the neck of her silk blouse, watching what was happening. Other voices joined in at the sandpile: “C’mon and see the blind boy!” and before too long, a score of hopping, shouting, boys and girls of all sizes were crowded around Johnny-Bob. They were watching and pointing and calling — until suddenly Cass could stand it no longer. She leaped to her feet and ran — heedless of Chad’s calling, “Cass, come on back here! Stop!” And when she reached the spot where her son was, surrounded by gaping eyes, she shoved them aside brusquely, yanked Johnny-Bob up by the arm, then stooping to pick him up, carried him away in her arms, tears rushing from her eyes.
Afterwards, when her moment of panic was over, after Chad had sent Johnny-Bob to return the tin shovel to the boy named Davis, after they had driven home silently on empty stomachs — Johnny-Bob had been let out to play in his own sandpile in his own backyard, and Cass had taken a book out on the sun porch to watch him — after long hours, when Chad finally came out and pulled up a hassock beside her, what he said made sense. That Johnny-Bob would have to face that sort of experience if he were to grow up in Bastrop and not off in some school for the blind; that he hadn’t been hurt one bit by the shouts or the stares; only Cass had; and that Cass had to stop making so much of his blindness or she’d hurt him more than anyone ever could.
It made sense then; but even when she relived the moment, and remembered Johnny-Bob sitting there surrounded by children who stared at him as though he were a freak, heard their voices and the high cry, “He’s blind; c’mon and see!” she could not keep the panic from beginning inside of her again, and a stricken feeling invariably flooded through her, stunning reason….
The second offense had occurred in mid-July, that muggy afternoon when
Chad was expecting a visit from an old Air Force buddy who was being driven up for the day from Mobile. About an hour before, Cass’s father, John Beggsom, dropped by in his pickup on one of his rare surprise visits.
Chad hated John, and the feeling was mutual. When he and Cass had chosen the name John for their boy, it was because it was Chad’s legal name, and he wanted a “Junior;” but it was also because he never remembered Cass’s father carried the same name. Chad always called him “that one,” “Beggsom,” “that bastard,” or “your father” — said like an oath of some kind.
Beggsom had been raised up in the Sand Hills, in the backwoods, in a dogtrot cabin. What brought him into Bastrop was a woman, Cass’s mother, whom he’d bought shoelaces from in the five-and-dime, down on West Tennessee, when he was passing through on one of his sales trips. Beggsom had a still up in a place called Blue Pill and he sold the same moonshine he made, coming out of the hills every two months to do it. When he fell for Angie Carmer, he gave up the still, used the profits from it, and years of savings, to buy a gas pump and a shed, and moved to the outskirts of Bastrop.
Beggsom hated three things most in this life — the law, the niggers, and the Lord — in that order. He was a medium-sized, square-built, unkempt fellow with a backwoods accent and a backwoods sense of humor that bordered on the vulgar; but he loved his own as violently as he hated what wasn’t his, and few people ever forgot the story of the night Angie Beggsom died in childbirth. It was known all over Bastrop that mere seconds after Doctor Walker lifted Cass from between her dying mother’s legs, John Beggsom drank a quart of whisky, one tumblerful after the other, in the dark of his front room, scowling and shouting at the four walls because he had loved her in a crazy way, and when — near dawn — a neighbor came to try to convince old John that he should sleep, Cass’s father was found on his knees on the linoleum in the kitchen, his big arms smashing through the air in fast, powerful waves, killing house ants with a hammer, crying like a baby.
If John Beggsom loved his own with an emotion too powerful for reason to penetrate and tame, his daughter loved her own with an emotion unchanged by its frequent exposure to reason. Whenever Chad began one of his tirades on Beggsom, Cass consoled herself with the thought that Chad had never known “close” family and checked her impulses to get up and holler herself red in the face at him, because most everything he said about her father was right; but she never said she liked John Beggsom. She loved him; that was something else.
So when Chad said, “Get your old man out of here before Tim comes. He didn’t fight a war to come back crippled and meet his kind,” Cass stuck to her guns. She said she wouldn’t make him go, she couldn’t, and Chad better not say one dang-dong word to him, or she’d go with him. She said Tim should understand he was a poor stupid old man, and she said she’d warn Beggsom not to say anything about the law or the niggers or the Lord. And it was while she was arguing with Jack just inside the screen door — with old John out in back under the crab tree — that a horn honked and Tim Ottley was there.
• • •
He was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down and without the use of his right arm; and there was a silver plate encased somewhere under the head of sparse brown hair. His round, sunk-in eyes were a matching brown, and solemn and wondering; and he talked in a slow, low tone, pausing for seconds between words, thinking over everything he had to say. He had been in hospitals for years; in rehabilitation homes for more years; and ultimately he had come back to Mobile, thin-haunted and search-worn. Most of what he had to say concerned his years of searching for some answer to himself and what he would do with that broken self, and about his decision to become a Presbyterian minister. He spoke of God’s work and God’s grace and the faith, and all through it, Cass held her breath, and Chad’s eyes darted nervously from Beggsom back to Tim Ottley.
Beggsom had been shifting his legs in the wicker chair set on the lawn, rubbing his chin with his stubby fingers, and fidgeting with a loose button on his short-sleeved blue shirt, the front of it stained with coffee, he’d spilled there. He had listened to Ottley, and nodded with his lips pressed together, and he had scratched his ear periodically and frowned, as though he were thinking over everything that was being said.
Then what both Cass and Chad were afraid would happen, did happen — happened above Chad’s protests and with Tim Ottley’s pale-faced, overpolite encouragement.
“Of course we want to hear the joke,” Ottley had said.
“It has to do with God,” Beggsom drawled, “and with a young feller like yourself, and as I’m to swear it now, it’s a true story I was witness to, back in the hills in the middle twenties, when you was only a gleam in your daddy’s eye.”
“Papa,” Cass attempted, “maybe Tim would rather just talk with — ”
But Ottley said again “No, let’s hear it, Mr. Beggsom.”
John Beggsom crossed and recrossed his legs, took a deep breath, and then said: “Happened at one of these here back-brush holyings. Old parson was preaching like a cow in heat, and the congregation was rolling around, yipping and kicking up straw. Parson got done and said ‘twas the hour for testifying, and after a coupla folks got up and told what the Lord done for ‘em, the parson called on a countryside cripple to rise up and say what the Lord done for him.
“Well, sir — ” Beggsom drew another deep breath and rubbed his cheek — ”Brother Fink, ‘at was the cripple’s name, was one of these paralytics, like yourself, with his limbs all twisted like snakes coiling around one ‘nother, going every which way. When the parson asked him to rise up and testify, Brother Fink rose, jerking and knocking like a new Ford on an old country road, trying to get his chin a bare inch from his chest, and trying to coordinate his lagging limbs. Everybody at the holying got quiet to see what he’d have to say and hear him testify.” Beggsom straightened himself in the wicker chair.
“ ‘Well, sir — ’ Brother Fink paused a bit, eyeing his audience, and then he began to shrill — ’You wants to know what the Lord done for me, he begins. Well, I’ll tell you. He jest blamed near ruint me!’ “
Beggsom leaned back in the wicker chair, rocking it on two legs and laughing uproariously. Cass looked across at Tim Ottley. His leps trembled in a desperate attempt to smile, but his face was ashen, and unforgiving.
Then Chad announced simply, “You’ll have to leave now, Beggsom.”
Oblivious to anything he might have done wrong, for John Beggsom was as insensitive as an old snapping-turtle, his weathered, red-nosed face lost its smile wrinkles, and his eyes, of the dull clearness of cooling lard, wondered.
“What’d I do?” he asked his daughter, for no matter how old Beggsom hated Chad, he always tried to be amiable when he called on them, to show Chad, for his “little girl.”
Chad said, “Just go!”
And Cass — witness to the mute injury that spread across the ignorant, time-worn face, alert to the blow at her father’s stubborn pride, now shattered and crushed — rushed to his defense.
“Don’t you dare talk to Papa that way!”
As a result of what followed then, it was Tim Ottley who left, pushing the rubber wheels of his chair with fierce determination toward the car where the Negro driver waited, protesting that he really did have someone else to see in the same county, and swearing it honest to God didn’t matter at all, that he knew it was just a joke; that he hated to be the cause of a fight; that he’d sure enough keep in touch, and when, hey, were they gonna be down Mobile way; stop in; don’t forget, bye, and look, don’t think about it another minute, hear?
• • •
Constantly during the age-long summer, Chad made reference to those two incidents, and each time it was the springboard to another fight. With the curious false modesty that overcomes a man and woman who sleep in the same bed, but who no longer seek the adjacent flesh for comfort, or love, or lust, Jack began wearing pajama bottoms, instead of sleeping in the raw as he always had, and Cass wore simple cotton
pajamas, instead of silk and nylon negligees. Mealtime was no longer a time for discussing the Citizen, for they rarely discussed anything anymore, and on weekend nights, they began to see a lot of bad movies.
It was a hot, boring summer of discontent, but then — miraculously, in the unrealized, creeping slow way the seasons change and are all at once just there — it was over. Suddenly it was the end of summer and the beginning of fall, and it was heralded in the high groan of ecstasy as Cass received him again, and at last; and things were new for it, and better, and back to normal. Anyway, she had thought they were; she had been sure, or she would never have attempted last night to tell him what she thought he should know — what folks were saying, and what she had been thinking, as well, about the editorials.
Then, the irony, coming like the quick snap of a wrist before the palm met the face — Delia Benjamin standing there before them in Porter Drugs’ beguiling and breathless with charm, the piquant aroma of some expensive perfume pervading the moment; and then, the slap in the face — as one gloved finger leaned on Jack’s sleeve, and the husky tone purred: “Chad, you’re doing a great job with the Citizen. I read two back issues in the car coming from Baldwin,” pausing, smiling, the finger slipped from his sleeve to fondle the infinitesimal gold lapel watch on her suit, “In all sincerity, Chad, I was immensely impressed. Particularly by the editorials.” Another pause; another smile, “Wonderful, Chad!”
• • •
Cass could feel her husband stir beside her in the big bed. Often in the sleepy beginning of morning Chad turned toward her, the red hair rumpled, eyes not yet fully open, hands reaching for her, touching her fondly in the soft and secret places, murmuring drowsily before he turned back to the big, short, second sleep of morning; but now he only flattened out on his stomach, stuck his arms up under the pillow, sighed and was still again.