He parked the truck and got out. He could hear female voices and laughter inside the house. “And Miss Edna, my momma said she hadn’t never, and my daddy said he hadn’t never, neither. Uncle Luther comes driving into the yard, and first thing they notice is the windshield’s gone. Second thing’s Aunt Becky’s feet, hanging from the open door. He’d done got mad at her again and kicked the windshield out, and she’d rode twenty miles, ready to jump every inch of the way.” Another round of laughter.
From habit, he checked his clothes to make sure they were straight; then he climbed the steps and knocked on the front door.
Shirley opened it. For a few seconds, she made no move to unlatch the screen, but simply stood there looking at him through the thin wire mesh, and he thought she might not invite him in.
“Hello,” she finally said.
“Got guests?”
She shrugged. Her hair had started growing back, in tightly matted clumps. “Dan has the pickup, and I needed a ride home, so Miss Edna and Cassie came over. You want to join us?”
“I probably got about as much business going to a prayer meeting,” he said, “but just now my own company leaves plenty to be desired.”
She had a fire going in the living room, but they were all in the kitchen, where Miss Edna Boudreau was peeling pumpkins and passing them on to Cassie Pickett, who cut them into wedges. Shirley said they’d decided to do some baking. The Boy Scouts were sponsoring a scrap-metal drive over the weekend, and the operators at the phone company had offered to provide pies and cakes as prizes.
Miss Edna, looking up long enough to assess his usefulness or lack thereof, noticed that he still had two hands and didn’t appear to be blind. “Go over there to the corner, Alvin, and bring the rest of the pumpkins.”
Afterwards, he was rewarded with a seat at the table. Shirley had made a pot of coffee, and they all drank some, the women continuing to work on the pumpkins and Alvin popping up every few minutes to carry the seeds and peelings to the garbage can out back.
Miss Edna, it developed, was not a bad storyteller, and she was more than willing to tell one on herself. Back in 1933, she said, before her father passed away, she had ridden with him down to Jackson in his Model A. They stopped at a red light in Yazoo City—“right there at the foot of Valley Hill”—and while they were waiting for it to change, she noticed a billfold lying in the street.
“I’m not here to tell you I was starving,” she said, “nor am I about to claim that going hungry might not have done me good. But things were, as the saying goes, tight. So I told Daddy to hold on and I’d pick up that billfold. I opened my door and jumped out, and as soon as I reached for it, the billfold scooted across the street about two or three feet.
“There was a big old magnolia tree right next to the street, and if I’d been more alert, I might have noticed that the trunk was plenty big enough to hide behind. But I didn’t have eyes for anything but that billfold. I decided my senses had betrayed me, that it hadn’t really moved, and that the next time I reached for it, my hand would close around it.
“When the billfold took off again, I let myself get a little unbalanced. Now if that happened to you, Shirley, or to you, Cassie, it stands to reason you’d recover. Alvin wouldn’t have seen the billfold to begin with, because this happened about nine in the morning, and he’d have been in bed. But I was there and I did see it, and when I tried to pounce on it, I went sprawling face-first into a mud hole. I looked up and saw some little smarty-pants running off down the sidewalk with that billfold bouncing along behind him on a string.”
Shirley laughed, and Cassie did, too. Alvin tried to summon a grin, but it wouldn’t answer the call.
“What’s the matter?” Miss Edna said. “Did I offend you with that remark about the hours you keep?”
“No ma’am. I’m not one to take offense too easy.”
“That’s good,” Miss Edna said. “If I had any reason to hoot with the night owl, I imagine I’d do it.”
“I bet you’d hoot real loud, Miss Edna,” Cassie said, and Miss Edna allowed that she most likely would.
Shirley stood over the stove, making pumpkin puree, her face damp from the steam. Cassie, in the meantime, mixed sugar, salt and flour in a big green bowl, and Miss Edna sat at the table, rolling crusts. While she worked, she talked to Alvin, asking him how his business was coming along and whether or not he thought he’d wind up in jail. If he ever did, he should contact her uncle Coleman down in Jackson, because he specialized in winning acquittal for folks that were guilty. “Mostly,” she said, “he deals with the more dramatic criminals—murderers and bank robbers and some of the bigger bootleggers and pimps—but as a favor to me, he probably would agree to handling a petty graft case.”
“Sounds like you got a fairly low opinion of me, Miss Edna.”
After glancing at the stove, where Shirley and Cassie were tasting the puree, she leaned toward him over the crust she’d just rolled, as if she meant to tell a risqué joke. “Alvin,” she whispered, “low and high don’t figure in.”
He dropped his voice and leaned forward, too. “They don’t?”
“Not at all. It’s just that I see you for what you are.”
“And what’s that, ma’am?”
Her mouth curled into an expression most men would call a lopsided grin, but he knew he was seeing something beautiful: Miss Edna Boudreau in remission from herself.
“Why, it wouldn’t be so darned interesting if it had a single name,” she said. “You’re one thing today and another thing tomorrow. A snake sheds its skin. You just shed Alvin Timms.”
Once the pies were in the oven, Miss Edna said she was sure folks would be pleased with their efforts but that she needed to get back to town because it was close to eight o’clock now and she went to bed at nine. On her way out, she told Alvin to let her know if he ever wanted her uncle’s phone number.
For a while, he and Shirley sat on opposite sides of the table, neither of them willing to speak. Eventually, she said, “What’s wrong?”
“Who says anything’s wrong?”
“You wouldn’t have come over if nothing was wrong. You know that just like I do.”
“Time was, I’d come over because something was right.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But as you yourself said not too long ago, things used to be different.”
There wasn’t much point in arguing, so he didn’t. “Senator Bilbo’s office sent somebody up here from Jackson to check out me and L.C., and Jasper Sproles, too. I don’t know exactly what happened, because L.C.’s not saying a word and Rosetta ain’t saying much more. But Jasper informed me the boy’s got to go in the army. Either that or he’s going to jail, and me and Jasper may end up there with him. Ain’t a thing in the world for me to do but go tell Rosetta. And I’d rather take a fiery poker in the rump.”
Shirley got up, walked over to the sink and drew herself a glass of water. She stood with her back to him, drinking. She’d lost weight in recent weeks, and her dress fit her like a pup tent.
She set the glass down in the sink. “Well, if he has to go fight,” she said, “I guess he has to go. Like so many other boys. Dan, for instance.”
“They won’t let colored boys fight,” Alvin said. “If they’d let them fight, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the government learned its lesson in the First War. They let colored folks fight then, and they came home wanting to be treated like white people. That’s just not in the cards, not then and not now. What the army means to do is put ’em in uniforms and send ’em as close to the front as they can, where they’ll have the pleasure of digging toilets or toting ammo. They’ll be exposed to fire theirselves, but the army won’t let ’em shoot back. They don’t aim to put a gun in a colored boy’s hands. He might take a notion to bring it home.”
“Well, what are you doing with him?” Shirley said. “You make him drive a bus around the county, selling Popsicles and MoonPies, and every Friday night he entertains you for the price of a littl
e whiskey. You don’t pay him one cent more than you have to, so he won’t ever have enough to quit working for you. That’s not much of a life, either, if you ask me. But it never crosses your mind that he might want something more. Because then you’d have to deal with all the implications, and that’d make you feel bad.” She shook her head. “Jesus, you’ll have to give him up, won’t you? Just like you gave me up. You’re running out of toys, Alvin. Before long, you won’t have a damn thing to play with.”
He realized then exactly how she saw him, how she explained his actions, past and present, to herself. A creature of convenience, he hadn’t quite lost his sense of right and wrong, and was burdened by the need to grope for explanation and justification. It was this need, more than anything else, which kept people like Miss Edna and even someone as cunning as Jasper Sproles from recognizing him for the complete deformity he knew himself to be.
“Oh, Alvin,” Shirley said as she finally stepped across the room and wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him close, “I don’t want to be a grown man’s momma.”
But having told him what she didn’t want to do, she found herself standing there massaging his shoulders, trying to soothe him as if, in fact, he were her son.
“That feels good,” he said. “Real good.”
She could see his reflection in the window. He’d closed his eyes. He was sitting there, lost in the sensation produced by her hands. “You got anything here to drink?” he asked.
“Stronger than coffee, you mean?”
“Little bit stronger, maybe.”
“Yeah.” She took a bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet under the sink, and they walked into the living room and sat down on the couch.
“Kind of strange,” he said, pouring two drinks, “for folks like us to be sitting around the table with the likes of Miss Edna.”
That was a phrase he’d used before—folks like us—and one she’d never liked, so she asked him now what he meant by it. But before he could answer, she said, “And don’t rear back with your hands behind your neck.”
“Why?”
“I hate it.”
“I’m comfortable like that.”
“Well, maybe that’s why I hate it.”
“You don’t like to see me comfortable?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just sometimes seems like there’s a connection between you finding comfort and me not feeling any.”
He laid his hands on his knees and sat there stiffly.
“You look like the father in one of those family scenes in The Saturday Evening Post. All you need is a turkey on the table and a napkin around your neck.”
He laughed then, and she did, too. “You know any Scripture?” he asked.
“ ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”
“Something more domestic.”
“ ‘Covet not they neighbor’s wife.’ ”
The smile dissolved. “He wasn’t really my neighbor. Not unless you give that word a pretty broad definition.”
“I think whoever wrote that Scripture probably did define it broadly, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I reckon.”
“If Scripture’s your guide, though,” she said, turning her glass up and taking the first swallow of whiskey she’d had in a couple weeks, “it’s strange that it keeps guiding you straight to my front door.”
“Least it ain’t guiding me to your back door.”
“Like it was before?”
“Yeah.” He studied the contents of his glass, then had a drink. “Like it was before.”
They sat there for a while, sipping their whiskey, neither one of them speaking. Before too long, Dan would probably come home, and while she had no urge to be alone, she didn’t want him to find her and Alvin sitting together on the couch. She’d just about made up her mind to say he needed to leave, when he pulled back his shirtsleeve and looked at his watch.
“Well, guess I better be going. Best time to talk to Rosetta’s probably early in the morning. Her mood usually sours as the day wears on.”
He finished his whiskey and set the glass back down on the coffee table, then leaned over and took Shirley in his arms. Her initial impulse—to pull back, to press her palms firmly against his chest and push him away, to order him out of her house and tell him not to show his face there again—was one she easily resisted.
“You never knew old lady McGregor, did you?” he whispered.
She didn’t know who in the name of God he was talking about, and she didn’t care. He smelled of sweat and whiskey and tobacco. The odor was thick, it had substance, and as she inhaled it, the moment seemed to thicken along with it. “Who?” she murmured.
“Ina May McGregor. She taught me and Jimmy Del back in fifth and sixth grade. Talking about definitions made me think of her. She was real big on making you memorize a word and then use it in a sentence to prove you knew what it meant. She’d give you twenty of those suckers a week, and we’d spend most of every Friday standing up there at the front of the room, every blessed one of us, using all twenty of them words, one right after another. And every time you come up empty, she’d make a black mark. Jimmy Del said he was getting to hate the whole English language, and I reckon I felt pretty much the same. At the time, it seemed to me like I wouldn’t need to know a single one of them words, and now, damn near thirty years later, I still don’t think I ever used more than three or four of them.”
He said the one he had the most trouble with, the one he never did get and didn’t know the meaning of today, was lugubrious. He kept thinking it had something to do with providing light, but Mrs. McGregor said he was thinking of luciferous, and then gave him a black mark.
“But as big as she was on definitions,” he said, “even Ina May always told us that at any given time, a particular word might mean a good bit more, or a good bit less, than the dictionary said.”
THIRTY FOUR
HOBGOOD MADE them slog through muddy drills at the football field, then dismissed everybody but Dan. While the others straggled off toward the armory, the captain said, “Son, are you still bent on enlisting in December?”
“Yes sir. My birthday’s the seventeenth.”
“You know, you probably wouldn’t have to do that, at least not right away, if you’d rather stay home another year or two and help your momma. You’re the only surviving male on the farm, and the selective service board can make allowances.”
“Yes sir, I understand that, but she already knows I mean to join up, and that’s why she took the job at the phone company.”
Hobgood gazed away at the goalposts, as if contemplating the chances of a field goal. “The day before your daddy . . . before he passed away, Danny, he come by the Highway Patrol office, and me and him sat and talked, like we did from time to time. He told me he hated like hell for you to see some of the things me and him saw, to do the kinds of things we did. Them things had to be done, and now they’ve got to be done again, but some of them are pretty hard to come back from. The last thing your daddy said was that he felt like he’d served the country enough for you and him both, and he’d do anything he could think of to keep you out of the army. And then, Danny, he said that word again. Anything.”
After hearing that, he needed somebody to talk to, and at this hour, Lizzie was probably the best bet.
The snack bar was only partially lit. He would’ve backed the truck away from the curb and driven home, but she was standing at the counter, wiping it down with a sponge, when she looked up, saw him and waved him in.
“How’s soldiering?” she said. “You still got that fool mechanic from the Chevy shop playing corporal?”
He climbed onto a stool. “Yeah. But Captain Hobgood don’t let him demonstrate weapons anymore.”
“All Gerry Bunch needs to know about a weapon,” she said, bearing down on the sponge, “is how to turn it on himself and pull the trigger.”
“Sounds like you’re not partial to him.”
“You could put it that way.”
“What’d he do? Leave the plug out of your oil pan?”
She quit wiping and stared across the street at the darkened Western Auto. “Forgetting to put something in,” she said, “has never been his problem.”
He was afraid to glimpse himself in the mirror behind the counter. His face probably looked as if he’d contracted roseola.
Lizzie threw the sponge in the sink, washed her hands, then dried them on a towel. “You want a piece of cake and a cup of coffee?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I wouldn’t mind the same thing myself.”
She brought out two pieces of pound cake, a pot of coffee and two cups, and they sat down across from each other in the booth at the rear. When he got back from the war, she explained, this place would look a whole lot different. Mr. Kelly had remodeling plans, getting rid of the counter and the booths and turning the place into a regular restaurant.
“And what’s a regular restaurant supposed to look like?”
“I guess there’s a bunch of little square tables with checkered cloths on them and a vase of petunias in the middle, and whoever waits on customers looks like she just came from church.”
“What do you mean, whoever waits on them? Ain’t that you?”
She stirred her coffee. “I’ve about had it,” she said. “I been in here from eleven in the morning till eight or nine in the evening every day for sixteen years, except Sundays and holidays. I guess I’d stay on if nothing changed, but when it does, I don’t want to be here. Because it’s kind of like my home, you know, except I don’t own it. Of course, I don’t own a home, either, just rent.”
He couldn’t imagine Kelly’s without her in it, and he said so. But she told him that there wasn’t any point in thinking you couldn’t imagine this or that. Someday soon folks were going to wake up and realize that the world wasn’t the one they’d always known. Mr. Kelly, for instance, never had to compete with anybody for business, since the Loring Hotel was the only other place downtown that served food, and nobody in his right mind would step foot in that dining room. Now Kent Stark and a few others planned to open a full-service restaurant in the old post office building, and Kelly said that if he didn’t adapt, they’d take all his customers in no time.
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