by Vin Packer
“A girl ignorant enough to marry a man that bathes with his necktie on can’t pick and choose,” the man chuckled.
Buddy controlled a sudden surge of anger which seemed to well up in him. It was a vague form of the fury he felt when he lived in the Village, rooming with Lennie Gold, and Lennie would jump like a cat for a clothes moth on every single little slip of the tongue; snicker and smirk at him rocking his heels with his hands thrust in his trouser pockets making some supercilious comment like “Very interesting, Richard. You just said I can’t fate, instead of I can’t fake. Are you concerned with your fate, my boy? Worried you’re not making out as you should?” People who doted on twisting other people’s words just to have a second’s tee-hee, and people who waited with their hands halfway to their mouths for someone to make a mistake when he was saying something important — people like that were small. Small, and sick.
Buddy said coolly, “I don’t think you understand the implications behind what’s about to happen in your town on Monday.”
“I understand one thing. A law’s been passed.”
“I hope you’re not a nigger-lover.” Buddy glanced at him, as though to point a finger of suspicion, hoping the fellow would take notice and vehemently deny any such thing. But he only sighed, taking his pipe from his mouth. Holding it, he said, “I’m not a Nigraw one-way-or-the-otherer, but a law’s been passed. That’s all.”
“A damn fool law!” Buddy said. “A law you can change by force! By ignoring a law that leads to niggers and whites walking arm in arm, hand in hand — and mister, that’s where this law leads. Do you like that idea?”
“I think I ought to respect the law,” the man said.
“I wouldn’t call you a typical Southerner,” Buddy said in a sarcastic tone.
The man didn’t notice. He said, “And you?”
“The whole nation’s watching Bastrop, Alabama, this week,” Buddy said; thinking God damn, he’s got me started; now I got to stop and take a leak; “but I guess you’re only concerned with yourself.”
“Sometimes that’s a full-time job,” the man smiled. “Are you affiliated with some organization?”
“I’m going to pull over a second,” Buddy said, “and take a leak. No, I’m a private citizen like yourself.”
“From up North?”
“New York City.”
“And you came all the way down here to Bastrop because the Nigraws are going to school Monday?”
“Because they’re going to school with the whites,” Buddy said. “Where will I pull over. Here?”
“Seems like a long way to come for trouble. You can pull in just ahead there, where State 1 crosses Eleven. You’ll want to go on down Eleven, takes you right into Bastrop.”
Buddy said emphatically, “It was!” Then he noticed the man pointing ahead of him.
“Right down the side of this road, there’s a dip. You can run down there. Be out of sight. I’ll walk from here. It isn’t far.”
“Why don’t you wait?” Buddy said, easing his foot down on the pedal, letting the motor run as the car stopped, “I’m only going to take a leak. Be a minute.”
But the big fellow got out on his side and said, “I appreciate the lift.”
“Why don’t you come down to the courthouse at noon?” Buddy said. “I intend to give a little talk.”
Buddy’s rider waved. “I might at that,” he said. Then he waved again, unsmiling, and went.
Going down the slope, toward the cluster of Judas trees and blackgums, Richard Buddy saw someone — a girl with short black hair — the girl, he thought with some slow amazement, who had given him the prize in last night’s dream. She was standing there alone in the clearing by a log — as real as life.
Then he remembered that yesterday he had nearly collided with her at the drugstore.
6.
“Senior, do you think our boy’s happy?”
— Gay Porter
WHY DO you ask that?” Senior Porter had said, spooning up the sweet milk gravy at breakfast that morning. “Seems happy, don’t he? Got everything he wants, I’d imagine.”
But Gay Porter was always asking that — always — since Troy was born on the day President Harding died, that sizzling summer she won first in jellies and fourth in cakes at the Tri-County fair.
She asked the question, and then she answered it: “Law, I don’t know, Senior. Poppy always dragging her folks along with them on their nights out.” Answered it that way or some other way, but always in a way that hid — even from herself — the secret disappointment she harbored over the fact that her son had seldom needed her for comforting; that she had rarely had occasion to “take up for him” in the face of criticism; and that his life, unlike his father’s, and unlike Gay’s own daddy’s, had been a relatively mild and blameless one. Only when he had gone through what Mrs. Porter thought of as, “that period with Poppy” before their marriage, had he ever really seemed confused, or reckless, or “in trouble.” And then, Mrs. Senior Porter had felt morbidly depressed over Troy’s position in the matter, because to her mind a man did not snivel after another man’s girl. A man played the field, and he whored, he was always hard to get, and never wholly captive, but he did not make a fool of himself over a young lady who didn’t return his affection. And in the rare cases when a man did, it ended tragically; and he almost never married her. He almost always married someone else, and the “affair” became something of a family legend — the dark-lady-in-daddy’s-past sort of legend.
Senior Porter had pulled his napkin out of his vest, tossed it beside his bowl, and sighed, “Well, now, Gay — Troy’s always liked the Beldens. Don’t suppose he minds at all Poppy’s dragging them along: Putting it in that understated way; because neither Gay nor Senior wanted to accept fully the Judas truth that their son was more taken by Poppy’s folks than his own.
After he had breakfasted, Senior had gone off into the back yard to play with his son’s children before going down to the drugstore for the day, and Gay had sat at the table in her rose-colored wrapper, stirring her second cup of tea, listening to the squeals of little Pryce and May B. as Senior romped under the plum bushes with them, and studying the clock, that had belonged to her great Uncle Colin and that now rested on the antique round table in the corner. It was eight o’clock, and Poppy had promised to come by eight to pick up the children. But Poppy was careless about so many things.
Gay Porter was not careless. She was a handsome white-haired woman with every pin in place. Married thirty-seven years to Senior, she’d never once let him see her with her teeth out; never once appeared before him with rags in her hair or grease on her face; and always remembered to touch her ear lobe with some soft scent before he came home in the evening, when she got up in the morning, and at bedtime.
He used to say — back in the love-ripe, tremble-sighing years of not-married-long: “Oh, God-Lord, God-Lord, my darling, I can remember the way you smell right now, sometimes when I’m in the midst of filling a prescription, and I ache around my groin, and I feel like coming on home and business be gone-dogged!”
And now he said: “Honey, you still wear that sweet-smelling stuff, don’t you? S’nice.”
And in between then and now, there was enough living to make the now seem enough and more, for any man to tell his wife in bed.
For Gay Porter had married Senior, neck-deep, candy-ankle in love with him, and Senior was a good catch on both sides of his family and in looks and charm as well. She had known him to be wild with tender passion for her and rough with unpolished lust for her; and the night Troy was born, she’d known too that he’d been down in Selma with Lynn-Ann Allston, a girl ten years younger than himself, from over in Baldwin, where he’d been going for some seven months to carry on an affair. She’d held him and rocked him like a baby in her arms when Troy’s little sister, May-Belle got killed by a school bus; and one night after a druggist convention when he came home from New York City with lipstick-covered handkerchiefs and a new word,
“call-girl,” she’d heaved a ship-shaped paperweight at him, hit him in the head, and scarred him. Together they had loved, budgeted, fought, splurged, laughed, prayed, gossiped, and traveled as far north as Boston, as far South as Miami, and as far West as Ohio. Their marriage had proved successfully exciting. And if Gay had to admit that her son’s marriage was equally successful, she would never see anything exciting about it.
What had ever excited Troy about Poppy in the first place, Mrs. Porter simply could not fathom try as she might.
She sat there sipping her coffee, worrying it all, when she heard the back screen door slam, and the snap of the radio’s button in the kitchen. Sometimes she wondered if Doris ever listened to the music that played over the radio from the time she arrived in the morning, to the time she left in the evening, or if the colored girl just kept the radio on to shut out the rest of the world while she was working. Sometimes Mrs. Senior Porter was impatient with the thought that Doris Towers was actually disinterested in the personal life of the Porters, that she was unlike other help in that she seemed more aloof and withdrawn. For some perverse reason it annoyed Gay to believe that Doris didn’t even “carry tales” back to Puddin’ Nelly about Senior and her; that she didn’t listen to conversations or rummage through private things, and God knows she was a readin’ nigger too, could both read and write. Mrs. Porter wasn’t sure, but she thought she’d heard somewhere that the colored girl had even gone to college down in Selma.
Probably the thing that irritated Gay Porter most about Doris Towers was the thought she had the moment the girl came through the kitchen door into the dining room. Thought: Gaw, she is a beauty — even in that tacky white maid’s dress.
“Do you want me to clear now?” the girl said.
Gay Porter believed the story that had circulated about a year ago. Crabb Suggs had hidden in the dark down near Love Lucy Hill one night, people said, and when Doris Towers came from Chadwicks’, where she used to work, Crabb Suggs had knocked her down and raped her. Senior always told it that Suggs had knocked her down and knocked her up, and Turner Towers had gotten into such a swivet over it he’d actually tried to bring Suggs to trial. He’d gotten up a signed petition saying Suggs was always hanging around Love Lucy Hill at night waiting for the colored girls, and he’d tried to get the law to prosecute Suggs.
Crabb said at the time that the scratches on his face were from some damn fool cat he’d tried to get out of the back of his car when he was over in the next county fishing — that same night — and Duboe Chandler and John
Beggsom swore they were with Crabb, even brought a cat’s carcass in to the sheriff and said they’d had to shoot the critter out of the car.
People said Deacon Phillips, the nigger minister, saw to it Doris Towers got aborted over in the nigger clinic at Morrow; and some said Jack Chadwick paid for it. Which led more to say Chadwick had been the guilty party to begin with, and Grab Suggs just the scapegoat.
Gay Porter believed that too.
“I guess you can clear, Doris,” she said, fiddling with her spoon at her saucer, watching the slender, soft, full-figured girl gather up Senior’s dishes. “Doris? Doesn’t Turner’s sister work for the Chadwicks now?”
“Yes, ma’am. Ginny Lee works there.”
“Umm-hmmm, I thought so.” She dropped the spoon and began to fold her napkin. “There must be some excitement over at the Chadwicks today.”
“Ma’am?”
That was the unknowing look on Doris Towers’s face which maddened Gay.
“Delia Benjamin’s return,” Gay said, and felt like saying, you know full well!
“I didn’t know Miss Benjamin was back,” the colored girl said. She started to leave for the kitchen with the stack of dishes, but Gay said: “You mean to say Ginny Lee didn’t mention it down in the Nelly, Doris?”
“She may have, ma’am. I didn’t hear it, s’all.”
“I suppose it’ll kill Mrs. Chadwick,” Gay said.
Doris stood there holding the dishes, brown-skinned, tall and straight, with the brown eyes that could shine as if she had fever. Gay had seen them once that way, seen her down by the Wheel with Turner, laughing while he was trying to back his car out — but usually Gay saw them the way they were now, solemn, blank.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Doris said noncommittally.
“Was she hard to work for?” Mrs. Porter asked her. “I’ve always heard that Cass Chadwick is a very temper-mental type. Never did get over her son’s being born blind, that way — like there was some sort of stigma on her. Course a lot of children are born blind and it has nothing whatsoever to do with blood. But I suppose she can’t help but wonder sometimes. Beggsom stock was never very high, goodness knows.”
Doris Towers said, “I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Well, law, now, you know whether or not she was a hard person to work for, Doris. Law, I mean — just compare. Would you say she was harder than me to work for, or was I harder than her to work for?”
The girl shifted the arm cradling the plates. “I never had any trouble working for Mrs. Chadwick, ma’am.”
“And here?”
“No, ma’am.”
“But we’re not at all alike, are we, Doris?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
Mrs. Porter sighed. “You certainly are a close-mouthed Nigra girl, aren’t you, Doris? Well, all right then, run along to the kitchen. I just thought because you were maid at Chadwicks’ once, you might be interested in knowing the news.”
The girl said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and shoved the swinging door open with her foot.
• • •
Gay Porter sat in the crown-backed rosewood chair looking up at the portrait of Cousin Captain Pryce-Bob Tinsel, her hero cousin, who lost a leg at Chickamauga; and beside him, the portrait of Senior’s daddy, Calhoun Noailles Porter, blood relative of John C. Calhoun. There was a whole gallery more, all the way around the walls, and all kin with good blood — either on her side or on Senior’s. Gay could only wish Troy had appreciated the legacy instead of diluting the blood with Scotch-Irish stock that didn’t hold true for more than two generations. But young people don’t think a doodely-dong about linage any more, Mrs. Senior Porter thought, rising from the breakfast table, or tradition or genteel living. She crossed the hallway and went into the living room. Young girls would as soon marry some hobo from the state of Washington as a clean-living son of the Cotillion starter. Mrs. Senior Porter always thought of the state of Washington as being occupied entirely by bands of hoboes, when she thought about that state at all, because it was so far off it horrified her to imagine it; and because almost nobody ever knew anyone from there. Crossing the Brussels carpet in the living room — owned by her great-grandmother’s Cousin Eugenia and handed down from Mrs. Porter’s own mama, with the roses only now getting thin in the pattern — she thought: young men would as soon court some nouveau riche trollop born on Tobacco Road who can’t tell an antique highboy from a bedroom chiffonier, as court a Key-Ice Belle from Tuscaloosa raised on good manners and Sally Lunn. Thought, standing before the window looking out on Airlie Avenue:
For all the blood in the Benjamins, Dee was a bad apple.
Flo won’t make a good Terpsichore; muse of choral singing and dancing ought by rights to be thin, not built like the organ over at the Episcopal Church.
Stood rubbing her arms in the sun of the morning, watching the spider webs glisten on the hedgerows out front by the zinnia bed, thinking: About time! as she watched Poppy pull her roadster up to the curb.
Jud Forsythe was with her, coming up the walk with her now, smoking his old, beat-up pipe, wearing high-tops and a worn-out-in-the-elbows sweater, carrying his old Marine cap, and looking no more like a Minister of the Lord than Tuesday seemed like Sunday.
PART FIVE
“It’s nice to see you again,” the stranger had said.
He had startled her, coming out from behind the blackgums like that, offering flame for her
cigarette. He knew he had — knew by the slight, involuntary jerk to her body as she turned suddenly and faced him; but the slow arch to her eyebrow, and the cool, steady surveillance she gave him with the glistening, jade-shaded, changing green eyes as her lips sucked in the fire and made smoke, belied her surprise; he admired the way she had immediately regained control, and all she had said was:
“Oh?”
“At the drugstore last night. I opened the door for you.” He pointed at the cigarette. “You’d just confessed you were a chain smoker.”
She had laughed then. She was the sort, he had surmised, who was always sure of herself, always at the reins, imperturbable.
“You have a good memory.”
“It’s my conceit,” he’d answered.
She had on some kind of shirt dress, silken and clinging, with the three buttons that began at the neck, undone; and standing above her he could look down and see that she wore no bra; and see the white swelling flesh of her there, and the nipples awake, and he thought of his lips fastening on to them — gently, he thought, but his good memory haunted him, and like some snag-toothed, lewd and giggling ghost, whispered words once scored in some old text:
I will drag her, step by step,
Through infamies unheard of among men;
She shall stand shelterless in the broad noon
Of public scorn, for acts blazoned abroad,
One among which shall be … What? Canst thou guess?
He’d turned his eyes away, off to the warm sunshine, sifting through branches of sweet-gum and birch; and as though by some miraculous extrasensory perception she had heard his thoughts, she’d touched her long fingers to the lower button of the three, and looped it shut. And he could feel her action; wondered at the incredible shades of subtleties, unconscious complexities, and hidden human secrets sitting in the middle of the circle of:
“My name is Richard Buddy,” he said, looking back at her; at her face, at the dab of red on the tip of her cigarette, sick smoke coming in clouds; and she was beautiful. She shall stand shelterless in the broad noon of public scorn; why couldn’t he stop that from harping on his awareness?