One of the men—it is Odell Grissom—gets to his feet, then others like Odell with no sons left at home to do the evening chores, follow, leaving gaps in the circle, and soon is heard a grinding of starters and the catching of motors and the rattle of springs and truckbeds in both directions along the road.
Clifford gets to his feet—asleep both of them, numb—like a squatting idol come to life. Someone says, “Want me to do it for you? I can do it.” Clifford stares at the man. “You want me to milk? I’ll milk for you if you want me to.”
It is his brother Lester. But to Clifford, his mind still half submerged, it is his father as he looked thirty and more years ago when one day down behind the schoolhouse privies he, Clifford, had fought in his father’s defense the last fight of his childhood and the first one of his manhood, his faith in his father gone even as he fought to defend him against an accusation which the other boy did not even know he had made. He was twelve, the boy he fought two years older and a head taller; but before they could pry Clifford loose he had knocked out two of his adversary’s teeth, and had they been much longer subduing him he would have realized his intention to gouge both the boy’s eyes from their sockets. He had lost nonetheless, was losing all the time he was winning, knowing which was why he had fought so furiously. They held him—it took five to do it—while he gasped, “Take it back. Make him take it back or else I’ll kill him.”
“He’s gone crazy!” the other boy screamed. Blood bubbled from his mouth and trickled down his chin. The teacher was there now and the boy screamed at him, “He’s gone out of his mind! He’s crazy as a bedbug! Keep him away from me!”
He was beaten like the grown man he had just become—or as near to one as this day was ever to let him become—by the teacher, who laid it on all the harder because of his stubborn refusal to divulge what the other boy had said to provoke him, using a belt as thick as a harness strap, the holes for the buckle tongue raising blisters on his flesh as if he had been peppered with shot, then sent home bearing a note saying he was expelled from school for the remainder of the term. But it was long past midnight and nearly twenty miles away before the search party found him and brought him home. By that time he knew not only that he had fought for a foredoomed cause but that he had been a fool. He was ashamed now of not having known what he had fought to prove untrue. He was a farmboy. He had seen the bull mount the cows, the dogs stuck together for days, and had long known the difference between himself and his sisters; but he had made no connections. By the time they caught him on the road that night he knew—he had known it even as he fought—that his father was guilty of doing as the other boy had unwittingly charged, and that he would never in his life forgive him for doing that to his mother. And when they got home and his father garaged the truck and he stood waiting, not to take the beating he knew was coming but to fight him now with the same heedless fury as he had fought for him when he was a child a lifetime and ten hours ago, and the beating never came, he took this for an admission of guilt. Afterward, for three months, until they dismissed him as unteachable, he would sit beside his father on the truck seat each morning and afternoon going the six miles to and from school in the neighboring settlement, pretending to be somewhere else, speaking if spoken to, in monosyllables. He knew all there was to know then, so he thought. He had not noticed what must have been evident to everyone else until his mother told him to expect a new little brother or sister. He had hated that child—Gladys it was—for years. Within two years he had proved to himself for the first of many times the bestiality of his own sex and the woman’s lack of enjoyment in the act. When, years later, his mother gave birth to his youngest brother, he had not once taken his eyes off his father as they sat beneath the pear tree all the long while that she was in labor. It was a long and difficult delivery and through it all Clifford had not eaten, he had not stirred, he had not opened his mouth. When it was over and word came down from the house that Ma was out of danger Clifford said to his father, “If she had died I would have killed you. Now leave her alone. Don’t ever go near her again. She’s taken all of that off of you she should have to.”
The presence in the kitchen now of the neighbor women disconcerted Clifford. Methodical as a clock in doing his few chores, he was thrown off by the least disarrangement in his narrow familiar world. Under their collective gaze he reddened and his tongue seemed to grow too big for his mouth. He found the milk pail and the wash pail but could not remember where he had last put the rag with which he washed the cows’ udders. He filled the wash pail with hot water, then realized he had forgotten to put in the disinfectant powder. He got as far as the door, then remembered the funnel, went back for it, was almost to the door again when he had to turn back for the strainer.
In the barn the cows stood each at her stanchion, snuffling, licking their slimy muzzles, scraping up the crumbs of their morning’s feed with tongues as rough as rasps. Milk dripped to the floor from their ripe expectant teats; the air was heavy with the chalky sweet smell of it. In the shafts of sunlight from the windows, dust motes filtered endlessly. When he had closed and locked the stanchions around their necks Clifford fed the cows. Each received first a scoop of crushed cottonseed hulls. On top of that a scoop each of bran. Then half a scoop each of cottonseed meal, dense, delicious-smelling, yellow as granulated gold.
From the steaming bucket Clifford took the rag and washed the first cow’s udder. She, Daisy, had recently freshened, was swollen with milk. The touch of the hot water quickened the drip from her teats into the puddle on the floor beneath her. Drawing up the stool Clifford grasped her forward teats and commenced to knead. The first milk struck the bottom of the pail with a noise like a bullet. As the pail filled, the sound deepened, the twin streams, solid and uninterrupted, slicing through the foam, coming with such force as to open a hole to the bottom even when the pail was nearly full.
At the barn door Mrs. Shumlin stiffened her back and primed herself with wind, filling her lungs like a bellows, hoisted her battle ensign—the tuft of Trixie’s tail—and stepped inside just in time to see Clifford Renshaw pause in his milking, slump on his stool and bury his forehead in the hollow of Daisy’s flank. Daisy stopped munching and looked around and mooed inquiringly. “Ma is sick, Daisy,” said Clifford. “Real sick.” The foam on the milk in the pail made, in settling, a faint fizz. “What will become of poor me?” asked Clifford. Mrs. Shumlin hid Trixie’s tail behind her and, still holding her breath, tiptoed backwards out of the barn.
When Mrs. Shumlin let go of her breath it went out of her as though she had been punctured, and left her deflated. She would get no compensation from the Renshaws for the loss of her cow. Today all roads, all lanes, belonged to them. The world would not only extenuate, it would applaud Lester Renshaw’s endangering himself and everybody and everything else along the way in his haste to get home to the side of his dying mother. Trixie’s owner would be expected to feel honored in having been chosen to contribute her cow for a sacrifice upon the altar of reckless Renshaw filial devotion. A longtime neighbor of the Renshaws, and a mother herself, Mrs. Shumlin would have felt that way about it too if the cow had been anybody else’s. All she could do was congratulate herself on having been spared committing a breach of etiquette. Had Clifford Renshaw spoken a moment sooner she would have missed it, a moment later and she herself would have spoken.
A sly look spread over Mrs. Shumlin’s face. She had thought of another way to get herself another cow: Hugo. This sly look lasted only a moment; it was overlaid, as with a second coat of paint, by a slyer look. Mrs. Shumlin had thought of a way to get herself much more than just another cow. All this took only an instant, yet in that instant Mrs. Shumlin’s life changed, and she looked past her immediate surroundings like a person focusing upon a distant prospect In that instant she had foreseen and solved all the many problems to arise from the change she was about to make in her life. Mrs. Shumlin faced about and strode to the barn as if she owned it.
Mrs. Shumlin pee
ked with one eye around the frame of a window. Clifford Renshaw sat as she had left him sitting, slumped on his milk stool with his forehead against the cow’s flank. Mrs. Shumlin drew back, rested the back of her head against the wall, cupped one hand to her mouth and said in a voice not her own, “I am so worried about you, Son. I don’t worry about the rest, only you. What will become of you when I am gone? Oh, Clifford, my poor boy, how will you manage all alone, with nobody to look after you?”
Mrs. Shumlin did not look in to see what effect she had produced. She ducked beneath the window ledge and scurried around the corner and along the wall and around the next corner to the window on the opposite side of the barn. There she crouched and peeked through a crack in the wall. Clifford Renshaw sat on his stool with his back to her looking in the direction from which she had spoken.
“I could go happy,” said Mrs. Shumlin with a sigh, “if I knew I was leaving you with somebody to take care of you.” That was all she had time to say, for Clifford spun on his stool to face her way. She saw his face darken with suspicion and his head toss and the aim of his eyes settle upon the spot where she was, and quitting that spot she scampered around to the far side of the barn. There she peeped through a crack and saw him leaning out the window where she had been and turning his head to look in both directions.
Mrs. Shumlin let go a long sigh of pain and regret that jerked him back inside and froze him with fear. “If only you had a wife. A good woman to look after you. One like that sweet little Mrs. Shumlin who lives down the road.”
Clifford came tiptoeing to the middle of the aisle that ran between the stanchions. He was darting his eyes all about in confusion, fear and mistrust. His expression was divided between disbelief, fear of being made a fool of, and shame at his disbelief. Mrs. Shumlin shifted around to the opposite side of the barn.
Releasing another pained sigh upon the air, Mrs. Shumlin said, “I don’t know if she would have you but it would be nothing lost by asking. Don’t give up if she says no at first. Keep after her.”
Again Clifford’s brows knitted and his eyelids narrowed and he took steps her way, and again Mrs. Shumlin circled the barn.
This time when she spoke to his back he did not turn. Her voice had come to him from so many directions that now it seemed to be coming from all directions, from no direction at all, from out of the enveloping atmosphere. She said, “She is a pearl and if you could win her you would want to always let her have her own way in everything. Always take her side in any quarrel, even against your own brother. Let yourself be guided by her, for you know, Son, you haven’t got much practical sense, and she has got a bushelful. I could go happy if I knew I was leaving you to her.”
She could probably have concluded her message in safety from that same spot. She had him entranced. He had given up looking for the source of the voice. He believed. But lest any last minute doubts assail him, she moved one last time. She fetched up her most heart-rending sigh yet. “That,” she said, “is your poor mother’s last wish on this green earth of God’s.”
His back was to her but she did not need to see his face. In the stoop of his shoulders, in the inclination of his head, in the hang of his arms, she could read unquestioning belief, unresisting submission.
Despite her efforts to get away unseen, Mrs. Shumlin was seen by Hugo Mattox on her way back from the Renshaw barn. Hugo rose from his place in the circle of men squatting beneath the pear tree and excused himself for just a minute and ran after Mrs. Shumlin.
“It wasn’t a party,” said Hugo. “I guess you found that out, too. I’m sorry I said that. I wouldn’t if I’d’ve known. Of course, I never said anything about my cotton and all that.” Hugo looked past Mrs. Shumlin to where a cow would have been if she had been leading a cow, and said, “I see you never took one of their cows like you said you was going to, either.”
Mrs. Shumlin tapped the tuft of Trixie’s tail against the palm of her hand. “Hugo?” she said.
“Yes’m?”
“Hugo, I’ve been doing some thinking.” She gave the tuft of the cow’s tail a couple of taps against her palm. “About what you told me. You say that when you seen that other car coming to wards you you winched your eyes.”
Hugo nodded, swallowed.
“And that when you opened them again you was clear across the road and everything was all over. Isn’t that what you told me, Hugo?”
“Yes’m,” said Hugo.
“In short, you never seen what took place. Did you?”
Hugo shook his head, and swallowed.
“And the last time you seen my cow before winching your eyes her hind end was to wards you. Is that right, Hugo?”
Hugo nodded. “Yes’m,” he said.
The future Mrs. Renshaw gave the tuft of Hugo’s cow’s tail a final tap against her palm, then handed it to him. “I’ll milk her for you this evening,” she said.
“I’ll have to ask you to let me work it off in installments,” said Hugo.
“We’ll work it out,” said Mrs. Shumlin.
“Thank you, Ma’am,” said Hugo. Then, “If it wouldn’t be too much imposition I’d be much obliged to you if you would take in my wife and kids for the night, Mrs. Shumlin. Don’t go to no trouble. Just make them down a pallet on the floor. Tell Audrey for me I’ll see her and them just as soon as I can. I don’t know just when to say I’ll be able to get away. You see how it is. A man can’t come and find folks setting up with their sick mother and not set with them, can he?” Hugo turned to look at the ring of men squatting beneath the pear tree. Permitting himself a shallow sigh, Hugo said, “Looks like this just ain’t my day.”
XIV
The place he had chosen for privacy was the least private place in the house. Three times already he had been interrupted by somebody rattling the door wanting in. The room was hot and airless and stank from its last user before him.
Doing to yourself what he was doing drove you crazy, he used to be told in his high-school Physical Education class. Maybe it did in the long run; in the short run what drove you crazy was not doing it. He had learned that. Scared by what he was told, he had quit, and had fought off the temptation until he nearly went out of his mind, until he got stone-ache and swelled up and turned blue and then got sick, real belly-griping sick, throw-up sick. That was what he had been headed for today. Now he learned that in the long run the gym instructor had been right: doing this to yourself as a grown man drove you crazy. Crazy with solitude and shame.
Crazy with frustration, too. He had thought that, considering the state he was in when he finally gave in to the urge, it would be over with quickly. The remorse could come afterward, at least the operation itself would soon be over. But this sorry substitute was not what he craved. This joyless friction, far from cooling desire, only rubbed it to a heat. The real thing was what he craved. And now even in fantasy she fled from him, tantalized him, tormented him. Those images of her that had goaded him into this state flickered and faded away now that he required them to help him attain relief. Parts of her anatomy—clefts—globes dusky and smooth as the skin of plums—moved in and out of focus upon the projection screen of his mind. Upon that screen shone more vividly the image of a boy, himself—shame-ridden then, how much more so now!—seeking self-solace upon this same seat, behind the same locked door. Superimposed, like a double exposure, over this image: that of his dying mother lying unconscious now behind another door just down the hall.
He was growing more franric by the moment. Curses and pleas, desire and disgust, self-pity and self-loathing, opposites that like the polar charges which combine to make electricity, sent through him a constant current of shock, setting his every nerve jangling, every nerve-end burning with shame. Adding to his distress was the sense that what he was doing resembled in some way the real thing as he had come to know it. Even when he was with her he wanted something more than that, too, though he had that in every form it came in. She seemed never to care what he did to her in bed, certainly she never obje
cted to anything he did, so he did everything there was to do. And even at the peak of his pleasure he wondered whether the very indifference with which she endured such treatment from him meant that she would do the same, did the same, with some other man (and him black)? This constant craving for sex, what was it but a craving for something which sex alone had not been able to gratify? He called it sex: the itch for more and more of it and in all the forbidden ways, that made his mind, that made the mind of most men his age, into a nonstop stag film; but he sensed that his frenzy and his perversities signified a longing for something more. He wanted to do things with her that degraded them both and united them in secret guilt. He wanted her to have no privacy from him, no self apart from him. What seemed to be sexual frenzy was a frantic desire to possess her very soul. He might even almost have been able to endure the thought that he shared her body with another man if he could have been sure her soul was his. He assaulted her body as though it were a fortress that he might break through to her soul in its fastness. He knew that assaulting her body, though he were to do it ten thousand times, was not the way to conquer and capture her soul. Yet he would make that futile assault ten thousand thousand times before he would acknowledge that the only possible way to gain her soul was to ask for it, offering his in return. The desires of his flesh and his heart’s desire might be one and the same, but to him they were as different as black and white. Better to be a lecher than a lover if to be a lover was to be a niggerlover.
He could not go on with what he was doing, neither could he stop doing it. He was on the edge of frenzy, breakdown, shaking all over, his breathing so labored, so deep-drawn that the swelling of his chest brought it in contact with the razor that dangled on the string from around his neck.
He looked down with hatred at himself; his glance took in the razor. In an instant, with one swift surgical stroke, he could sever that malignant growth from him and be free. Free of longing, free of guilt, free of her and all her kind. This was for him the one fitting punishment, atonement, and deliverance. Expiation for his sins as a son, a husband, a father, and a white man, and lifelong deliverance from his thralldom to that thing, that growth, which never had been anything but a running sore since it first rose on him, never any pleasure except the pleasure of momentary relief from its incurable ache.
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