And she sang it that evening after they retired Mr. Isaac and gave him his chair and Sammy wiped his eyes and set him in it by the Amen Corner and Mama at the back switched off the lights and the pageant members took their stations unseen and most of the coughing calmed into waiting breath and the preacher recited in the dark, “And there were in the same country Shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid. And the Angel said unto them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.’”
She started it back in the Sunday school rooms out of sight, and the first words didn’t carry, but she came on closer till soon every sound was cutting the pitch-black air like a new plow point, reaching some eighty people. Then she moved into sight—to join her song—through a door up front at the side, trailing behind her a swarm of humming girls, mostly Guptons, in cheesecloth veils with trembling candles that were all the light in the church. They were meant to be Messenger Angels, and Baby Sister’s song was meant for the Shepherds, and when she was at the pulpit and the girls closed in around her, there they were—Moulton Ayscue and John Arthur Bobbitt and Bracey Overby, stretched on the floor in flannel bathrobes with peeled sticks beside them. At the touch of light they sprang up afraid and crouched with quivering arms while she finished—
Let every heart
Prepare him room
And heaven and nature sing.
Then the preacher went on. “And it came to pass as the Angels were gone away from them into heaven, the Shepherds said one to another”—and Bracey said, “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.”
But Baby Sister’s girls were the light. They couldn’t go away so they led the Shepherds slowly to the choir where Macey Gupton stood as Joseph and Rosacoke sat as Mary and Frederick Gupton, eight months old, rested in a basket set on legs, as Baby Jesus. The Shepherds stopped in front of him, and Mama at the back switched on the overhead star and the Angels circled behind. When the flames had steadied in their hands, a ring of light crept past Rosacoke and Frederick till it reached the two front pews and the Amen Corner where Mr. Isaac was. The Shepherds knelt in the center of that ring. Each one laid a hand on the manger that rocked with the weight, and John Arthur Bobbitt commenced to nod his head. On his third nod the Shepherds sang ragged and thin,
Away in a manger,
No crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus
Laid down His sweet head.
They had been warned at practice to sing low enough and not scare the baby, and the way they started there seemed no danger, but still Rosacoke leaned over to see how he was. His head was turned away and a fist was against his ear—that was all she could see—but he seemed asleep, seemed safe, so she looked beyond the boys and followed the weakening light to its edge, and there was Mr. Isaac, ten yards away, dim. (Sammy was somewhere dark beside him.)
He had had a long full day—a full week, eating that cake of soap—and even in the dimness she could see his face was not calm yet. His face was all she could see, and silver spokes in the wheels of his chair, but she looked on awhile till she reckoned she saw other things, things she needed to see just then—that his eyes were set towards her, looking a way she had not seen before, not the blank look of his strokes or the old shielded way but unsatisfied, wondering, as if he might turn any minute and jerk Sammy’s sleeve and try to whisper, “I do not understand” and point at her. She said to herself, “I ought to beg his pardon—acting so wild this afternoon, confusing him like this. What I will do is, go back to see him Christmas day if it’s fair and tell him, ‘Mr. Isaac, I have come to beg your pardon for my actions last Sunday. You have always been good to us, and I’ve felt mighty bad, running out on you like that, so I know you will understand when I say I am not myself these days. I am toting more load than is easy alone, if you know what I mean.’” She kept on staring and she wondered, “What will he say to that? When my Daddy was killed he drove to the house after dark and sent in for Mama and waited on the porch till she came and gave her fifty dollars, saying, ‘Emma, he is far better off.’”
He waited through her thinking, still as he was that time they found his spring and him cooling in it—her and Milo and Rato and Mildred Sutton. The candlelight trembled on his face—the Guptons were fidgeting—but she knew his look hadn’t changed, that he did not understand, and looking inward till she couldn’t see him at all, she told herself, “I can’t just beg his pardon and not say why I acted wild. So what on earth can I do?—stand by his stale bed and point out his side window past the pond and say loud enough for him to hear (and Miss Marina up the hall), ‘What I mean, Mr. Isaac is, one evening early last month I followed some deer in your woods. I thought they were headed for the spring but they weren’t, and then I came to a broomstraw field you may not have seen and laid down under a boy I know that was with me. I have known him quite awhile—eight years last month. (I met him when we was just children in your woods, where there’s a pecan tree that the path bends round.) Anyhow, that night I offered this boy what I reckoned he needed to hold him. I looked on it as giving. But it wasn’t like no kind of giving I ever saw. I just laid back still in the dark—I couldn’t see him—and he did what he had to do, and I was the one got caught with what he gave. His burden is swelling up in me right this minute without no name but Mustian. Oh, I held the boy. But I don’t want him now. All this time I have lived on the hope he would change some day before it was too late and come home and calm down and learn how to talk to me and maybe even listen, and we would have a long life together—him and me—and be happy sometimes and get us children that would look like him and have his name and answer when we called. I just hoped that. But he hasn’t changed. He said he would ride me to Dillon tonight and take me to Norfolk after Christmas to spend my life shut up in a rented room while he sells motorcycles to fools—me waiting out my baby sick as a dog, eating Post Toasties and strong pork liver which would be all he could afford and pressing his shirts and staring out a window in my spare time at concrete roads and folks that look like they hate each other. He offered me that. But that isn’t changing—not the way I hoped—so what I have done, I will sit home and pay for. I am not glad, you understand, but I ain’t asking him to share what trouble I brought on myself.’”
Then Mr. Isaac moved and Rosacoke saw him again. His head turned from her and bowed and his lips parted, whispering to the dark where Sammy was, and since it fulfilled her thought, she halfway expected his hand to point her way, but Sammy’s hand stretched out—just his hand—and covered Mr. Isaac’s for a second. Then the live fingers flicked to his mouth, and he faced her again and ground his jaws one time, looking almost satisfied. He was cracking candy under the music, and when he had swallowed, Sammy leaned forward out of the dark to wipe his chin with a handkerchief. Rosacoke saw first thing that Sammy was wearing the blue wool suit he had worn to Mildred’s funeral, and with his face held there before her, she strained to draw out some sign that would prove his part in Mildred’s baby, but he finished his wiping too soon and gave a quick look towards her and smiled with his eyes to show he knew before leaning back.
And Rosacoke knew she could not speak a word of what she had thought, not to Mr. Isaac. Saying it to him would mean telling Sammy—Sammy in the dark with all he knew—and anyhow what good was that news to him?—age eighty-two, claiming he couldn’t die but dead already in half his body, the other half shielded as always, hoping to live on to ninety and equal his father, and not understanding, after all this time not knowing half she knew. So she thought, “He don’t even know me. He has not known me all these years—not my name. He can’t know me now in this costume, and I reckon he is far better off.”
The Shepherds were coming to the middle of their song. Nearer the goal, their hands gripped tighter on the basket
, and their voices washed strong over Frederick to Rosacoke and brought her back—
The cattle are lowing,
The poor baby wakes,
But little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes.
She had not thought of Frederick since the Shepherds began, and a chill of fright twitched at the roots of her hair. She said to herself, “I have not done my duty,” and slowly, testing, her eyes worked down. But Macey behind her had shifted, and his great shadow hid the baby. She reckoned he was safe though, and she looked out straight before her over the Shepherds to the back of the church. Mama was supposed to be there, waiting to turn on lights at the end, but the back was dark as the night outside, and she narrowed her eyes to find her. What she found was four black figures against the wall—one that was Mama and three together in robes that were Milo and Rato and Wesley Beavers. When the Shepherds finished, the Wise Men would come.
And the Shepherds were curving onwards—
Be near us, Lord Jesus.
We ask Thee to stay
Close by us forever
And love us, we pray—
so for somewhere to look, hoping to rest her mind on something calm, Rosacoke bent forward over the basket. She could not see till her face was nearly at the rim. But Frederick had been seeing her. With the Shepherds singing at his left and his Daddy standing over him and his three blood sisters giving off the light, still he had set his eyes on her. She couldn’t know why or for how long, but she was glad a little, and at first he seemed peaceful as if he knew who he saw, as if in all his secret thoughts there was anyhow no fear—serious but peaceful, wrapped loose in a Gupton-blue blanket with bare arms free and only his fingers moving as if a slow breeze lifted them one by one. He didn’t seem cold but Rosacoke thought she could cover him better, and she put out a hand. He watched it come and when it touched, his eyes coiled against her and his fingers clamped and his lips spread to a slow black hole. Rosacoke drew back her hand and her face and thought in a rush, “Now I must wait while he makes up his mind to cry or be calm.” The Shepherds saw him too, threatening to break up their song, and they lowered their voices in hope—
Bless all the dear children
In Thy tender care—
but Frederick gave no hope of blessing. He hung fire before their eyes, every muscle in his body cocked against Rosacoke but waiting as if he would give her this last chance to offer what he needed before he called on the church at large. She could see that but she couldn’t move. She didn’t know a thing to offer, and she said to herself, “I certainly don’t have much luck with babies.” Then she looked up again—to the dim front pew where she reckoned Marise would be—and her eyes asked desperate for help. Marise was there all right, settled around her hard new belly, tireder already than Mr. Isaac and staring at her family performing—the ones standing up, Macey and the girls. She couldn’t see Frederick in his basket, but he had nursed her dry an hour before and swallowed ten drops of paregoric so her mind was at ease about him, and she didn’t even notice Rosacoke.
The Shepherds crept on to the end—
And take us to heaven
To dwell with Thee there.
Then they lifted their hands off the manger that rocked again and they stood, and Frederick turned to them, suddenly seeming calmer. But the Shepherds were finished. They were leaving. They ducked their heads to Frederick as a bow and filed to the rear of the choir and picked up candles from a chair and took fire from the Angels, adding that much to the light. When they were gone Frederick lay on through the quiet, still turned to the side, and he lay through the preacher’s voice, “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the King, behold, there came Wise Men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him’ … and lo, the star which they saw in the east went before them till it came and stood over where the young child was,” and when the Wise Men began their song, the distant voices seemed to calm him more than anything had—
We three Kings of Orient are.
Bearing gifts we traverse afar...
His fingers went loose again and his stiff legs bent a little, but he didn’t look back to Rosacoke, and that was for the best because at those first words, the cords of her chest took hold of her heart and a frown spread from her eyes. She was seeing the far dark wall. They were still at the back in darkness—the three men. They would sing one verse together. Then they would light their candles and come forward separate, offering separate verses. But before they moved, dim as they were, the sight of them deepened Rosacoke’s frown, and when Mama struck a match and held it to a candle, then Rosacoke was worse. But that first candle was Rato’s—it lit only his face—and as he began his verse and his march, she felt a little ease. He couldn’t sing—nobody expected him to—but he knew his words, and he moaned them in time to his long, shaking steps, looking down as he came.
Born a babe on Bethlehem’s plain,
Gold I bring to crown Him again—
King forever, ceasing never
Over us all to reign.
That much brought him almost to the choir, and the dark two at the back sent him on as they joined in the chorus—
O star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to the perfect light.
He came till his toes knocked hard on the first step of the choir, and looking only down, he bowed low enough to set a brass bowl on the floor by the basket. It represented gold, his gift. Then he unbent upwards and stepped to one side and rocked his face onto Rosacoke. She met his great yellow eyes and thought it was the first time in clear memory he had faced her so she smoothed her frown the best she could and tried to match his simple unrecognizing graveness. Then she waited while he searched her face, wondering, “Why is he staring at me like this? Have I changed that much since supper?” And feeling as she did—so low—she reckoned that was right. Maybe nobody knew her at all. Maybe nobody in all those dark pews saw what she thought they were seeing. Maybe what they saw was changed too far to know—not by a blue cambric costume but by what she had done that night seven weeks ago, by what she was making that grew in her body this instant not ten inches from her heart, twisted on itself in the dark, using her blood for its own. Maybe that face was showing through hers for all to see—shapeless, blind, nameless face. Needing some kind of answer she looked to Mr. Isaac. But if he knew her the secret would die with him. Sammy knew. Sammy saw both faces, surely—her old first face and this new one, working under it—but Sammy was out of sight. And Guptons, Aycocks, Smileys, Riggans, Overbys, Mama and Milo and Wesley himself, and Frederick if he would turn back and face her—what were they all seeing, what did they know from the way she looked? And supposing she stood up now right under that star and testified, “I am Rosacoke Mustian and the reason I look so changed tonight is because I am working on a baby that I made by mistake and am feeding right now with my blood against my better wishes—but a baby I am meaning to have and give my Daddy’s name to if it lives and is a boy, one I will try to raise happy, and I’d thank you for helping me any way you can”—what would they say to that? They would not believe her at first, and in time, when they did, they would turn their heads and never speak a word, much less offer help, and Mama’s heart would break. She looked up at Rato again. His eyes were still on her so—silent, with her lips—she said “Hello, Rato” and tried to smile, but the smile didn’t come and Rato didn’t answer, just looked down again as if what he had seen would last him a long time yet.
The only thing like an answer came from the back. Mama struck another match and lit up Milo and he started forwards. He was singing though he didn’t know the meaning of half he sang, didn’t care—
Frankincense to offer have I.
Incense owns a Deity nigh—
and he walked so fast he reached the choir with two lines t
o sing—
Prayer and praising all men raising,
Worship Him, God on high.
Then all three began the chorus, and Milo bowed to give his gift. What he laid by the basket was nothing to him but a cheap jewel box he had won on a gas-station punchboard six years before (he had never smelled incense in his life), and Macey, that he looked at first when he rose, was nothing but Macey-dressed-funny and the same for Rato and Shepherds and Angels and his sister Rosa and, at first, even Frederick. As he grinned at them all (he crossed his eyes at Baby Sister), they could see he was making up jokes to tell when the show was over—all except Rosacoke. She didn’t see him, not at first, not his face. She had not really faced Milo since the nineteenth of November, the morning she promised to stick with him, when they struck out for Raleigh and she got Wesley’s letter and read it and when she understood—stopped by that dead field and that pecan tree—went back on her word and told Milo to take her home, leaving him his whole burden. So she looked down at Frederick when the chorus began, but Frederick was studying Milo or maybe the fire in his hand, and as he looked Milo must have made some crazy face—Frederick oared with both legs and though he didn’t smile, he held up a hand. Rosacoke could see—anybody could have seen—that the hand was for Milo, and still singing, Milo put out his free hand, and Frederick took one dark finger and closed on it and drew it towards his mouth. Rosacoke had to look up then, and what she saw was almost that first Milo, the one who could tear her heart, and the look that grew on him was awful to her—not a frown but the way he had looked that night in Mary’s kitchen—and she had to change it. She had to draw Frederick’s attention to herself. She reached in the basket and commenced arranging the blanket, and Frederick turned her way as she hoped, letting go of Milo’s finger. That was all she intended but Frederick meant more, and when she took back her hands, he whimpered once—not loud—and huddled in readiness. Rosacoke didn’t move. She braced herself for what would come next, but behind her Macey had seen everything. He bent to her ear—“Rosa, pick him up. He’s fixing to yell.” She heard him (everybody heard him for yards and stiffened) but she didn’t move. She shook her head and said just with her lips, “Frederick, I ain’t what you need”—and to herself, recalling the last time she said such a thing, “I guess I can’t run this time.” The chorus stopped. Milo stepped aside and Rosacoke looked to the back.
A Long and Happy Life Page 16