“Amy, this is Lois,” said she, her voice choked with tears. “I hope you will listen to me. Please, listen. I’ve come to beg you again to come out and rejoin your family who love you and let us try to comfort and take care of you. I know what you’re feeling, Amy, hon. Like you just never want to set eyes on another human face, knowing you’ll never see Ma’s dear loving face again.” Lois had touched the nerve that was exposed: the groan that arose from the pipe and was picked up by her microphone confirmed it. “I know. I know. It’s how I feel, too. How all of us feel. But, sweetheart, you’re not helping things any by hurting yourself. You’re only making it harder on us all, worrying over you like we are. Open the door, Amy, dear sister, please, I beg of you, we all beg of you, and come out and let us look after you. Come out where we can all be together and comfort one another.”
She had told them, or rather, had relayed to them through her chosen messenger, that she had said her last, and she was true now to her word. From the cellar now—or rather, yesterday, when this had been filmed—came no sound. Lois sighed and got up off her knees and with tears glistening in her eyes came down the steps of the mound. She rose now from her armchair and quit the room, shaking with sobs. Clifford followed her.
As though to add to the insult, it was Jug Amy chose through whom to convey her last word. He was on guard duty beside the pipe. It was night, four hours before he could expect to be relieved. He was groaning inwardly but did not know he had groaned aloud until he heard a voice from beneath him say, “Who is there?”
Speaking into the pipe, he said, “Me, Miss Amy. Jug.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Watching out over you. I’m here to see that you don’t do yourself no harm.”
“I’m doing myself all the harm I know how.”
“Yes’m, you surely are taking it mighty hard. How much longer you reckon on before we can expect you to get feeling better in your mind and come out?”
“The rest of my life,” she said.
To the family, Jug said, wetting his lips, and having primed himself with drink, “Now don’t blame me if yawl don’t like this. I’m only saying what she told me to say.”
He shut his eyes and kept them shut throughout his recitation. The effect was as if he were a medium at a seance transmitting to them a communication from beyond the grave.
“She say she gone stay right where she is and for all the world to just go about their business and forget about her. She say anybody try to bust down the door and get her out they gone have her blood on their hands.”
“Just like I said,” said Lois.
“She say tell yawl to keep your preachers and your psychatrists cause she don’t care to hear nothing they got to say. She say she know her own soul better than any preacher and her own mind better than any psychatrist. She say she is where she belongs and where she wants to be. She say she the meanest woman alive and not fit to look nobody in the face nor see the light of day. She say she killed yawl’s mother. She say to say that again: ‘I killed my mother.’ She say for yawl not to come talk to her no more. She say she not interested in anything any of yawl got to say, either. She say, tell them if they knew how little I care about any of them they wouldn’t care no more what becomes of me. I told you yawl wasn’t gone like it but she made me swear and that is what she told me to say. And that, she say, is all the more she ever gone say.”
Now the preliminaries were over; the feature attraction could begin. She had had her daily bread and water, had heard the family’s daily plea; now she belonged to them. The camera roved over the crowd; faces appeared on the screen as in the sights of a rifle. For TV this coming interval would have to be shortened. Sometimes it took so long before anybody mustered the courage to go first that everybody there seemed to be saying to himself, if somebody doesn’t do it soon then I will have to. As over the faces of the suspects in a police line-up, the camera roved over the crowd, seeking the one ready first to break and confess his guilt.
Time now for a commercial.
On the other side of that coin of which Heads, I Win is the ideal old age he imagines for himself, there is for every man Tails, I Lose: the worst old age he can imagine befalling him. The future the man dreads may be remote from his circumstances in life, as remote as—heads and tails: opposites, but not separated from each other by very much. The rich man may see himself winding up a pauper. The man with a family as large and as close as Clyde Renshaw’s may see himself a lone and homeless old tramp sleeping in a doorway on Skid Row. In fact his, Clyde’s, familiar vision of the worst old age that could be his lot was to become one of those homeless old men in two tattered overcoats who, always going from somewhere, never to anywhere, ply the nation’s highways on foot in all weathers. Perhaps, in fact no doubt, part of his resentment against those of them who had lately begun to show up here on the place came because they brought to mind his old fear of winding up just such a one himself—though not, of course, with so many outward marks of the outcast upon him as these bore. Surely to be a homeless old man bad luck was enough; it was not necessary to have committed whatever things these had done to set them on the road and muttering to themselves.
Now—the ads over and the program resumed—seeing one of them get up from his seat on the ground and make his way down to the cellar mound (rather as if he needed to relieve himself, and was about to do it in public, Clyde thought) there came into his mind a picture of himself doing that very thing. He saw himself some years hence, though not so many as to account for that shuffle to his gait, the slouch to his shoulders, the silent movement of his lips and that look in his eyes hungry for home, as he came along the road. For it was the road home. The road to this place which had always been home to him but from which he had been gone for a long time, having left it for some reason he could not find, or rather, having had to leave it for some reason, something that had caused him not just to leave home but to expect never to see it again. What was this? Was it just this beard and the long hair which made him feel like one of those old tramps—look like one, too, he expected—along with that foolish old fear of his of being left old and homeless and a wanderer, and added to that, his thought of his self-exiled baby brother and his inability ever to come home again? He could not say, but in this vivid vision he saw himself trudging up the road, unknown and grateful to both his overcoats for hiding his identity, unrecognizable in his rags and behind his beard and the premature whiteness which had settled upon him like an early winter, even to his close kin. He saw himself come among that crowd, mount the cellar mound, up those steps he himself had ordered cut there years before not knowing he was cutting them for himself, and to his sister—still there, still faithful to her vow of seclusion—pour down the pipe his history. His history? What history? He did not know. He only knew he had one, and that he had come home, to Amy, hoping by telling it to her to gain readmittance not just to his own family but to the human family, if only as the poorest of poor relations.
It was the beard and this long hair. Two cast-off overcoats one on top of the other was all he needed now to make him look like another of those old tramps. Were there white whiskers in his beard? he wondered. Of course there were. There were in Ross’s, and Ross was younger than he. He would soon know, even if the mirrors were not washed off. If things went on as they were much longer it would be grown out long enough for him to see it without a mirror. Already they—the men—looked like castaways, with these whiskers, with hair beginning to straggle over their collars. The women, without make-up on their faces, were faded and dim and looked like ghosts of themselves.
On her return from taking the boys their lunch today Gladys reported more spots on the walls of the cold storage vault where chunks of ice had loosened and fallen to the floor, leaving the pipes bare. Beneath the thick coat of frost still sheathing the walls a steady dripping could now be heard. It was still like an igloo in there, but who knew how long the thawing had been going on before they noticed it?
&nbs
p; It was cooler weather now and the town not quite so dependent upon the ice house. Even those who would have liked to resume their use of the cold storage vault, the butchers and grocers and cafe owners, forebore under the circumstances to press. The crowd that gathered daily outside the ice house was definitely with them. Respect for parents, alive or dead, family feeling to the point that made the family a law unto itself: the Renshaws were not alone in that. Observance of the proper form, not wanting to bury their mother without all her children present, or at least until they had done all in their power to bring the last one home: all shared that. The Renshaws’ audacity in commandeering the ice house out of respect for custom commanded universal admiration. Well, almost universal. When they stood off the U.S. Navy the crowd was with them to a man. That was when the two MPs came from Waco to arrest Derwent for being AWOL. When Derwent announced his refusal to go back until his grandmother had been buried, the crowd formed a living wall around that Jeep.
“You see that crowd?” the Sheriff had said to Mr. Tom Gibbs, who was pressing him to go in shooting if necessary and evict the Renshaws from his cold storage vault. “Every one of them has got, or had, a mother.”
“Every one of them’s got a vote, too, haven’t they?” said Mr. Gibbs.
“They got that too,” the Sheriff cheerfully conceded.
The generating plant which supplied the power, a complex of turbines and louvered cooling towers, stood detached from the ice house, enclosed by a high cyclone fence with a padlocked gate to which Mr. Gibbs had the key. No knowing how long ago he had pulled the switch. The vault was steadily defrosting. It was still cold in there but not as cold as it had been.
In this TV reporter, the Devil had an advocate. A town man, he was embarrassed by the hillbilly holy-roller mentality here on display. That psychiatrist would have found an ally in him. Upon a number of members of the audience, especially those who had come from afar to get here, he had tried out his line that the woman in the storm cellar was simply sick. It was well known that she had done what she claimed to have done. She was sick.
Well, yes, uh-huh, they had heard something like that said. And they tried to see around him to the cellar mound.
Now he was beginning to lose patience and to show his annoyance with them for not giving him any argument. “Don’t you believe that if she was guilty of killing her own mother the authorities would come and take her out of there and prefer charges against her?”
“You would surely think they would do that, wouldn’t you? Yes, sir, you would surely think they would.”
Now he had stopped the man who had just come down off the mound. This was the second one of those whom he had tried to interview. The first one he had approached as he reached the ground and, holding out his microphone, had chased him clear to the edge of the crowd. The man was not refusing to be interviewed; he did not know that anybody was trying to interview him. He was in a trance. So was this one now: in a trance, a transport, exalted by the experience of having disburdened his conscience down that culvert pipe. Which so exasperated the reporter that he said, “Listen here. That woman in there is sick. Mentally sick. She no more killed her mother than you did.” The camera was on him. And what the viewer saw was the face of a man who might have just been talking to a man who had killed his mother.
It was not that any of the family expected Ballard and Lester to succeed in their quest. Even Clifford knew the world better than that. They would have been insulted by the suggestion that they were so backward as to believe their brothers were going to accomplish their impossible mission. Except that anybody who made such a suggestion would deserve rather to be pitied for his own backwardness. And for having so entirely missed the point. Ballard and Lester were not there to succeed but just to do their best. And yet the others, all but him, did at least half believe they might succeed, and such devices as the sky-writing raised their hopes. Although Lester admitted their having gotten the idea from an ad for Life Savers, it was smart of them to adopt it, and their having chosen the lunch hour, when workers were out of their offices and on the streets, showed that while they might be two country boys in the big city for the first time, they had observed its ways pretty closely. It was attention-getting—it had even gotten a write-up in the next morning’s New York Times—Lester had sent them a clipping—and where could you buy more advertising space than the skies of New York City? For over two hours, according to Lester, it had hung there, growing bigger all the while as the letters lengthened. But although it may have sent others with the same Christian name hurrying home, to Kyle Renshaw, if he was there, and if he had been out on the street that day at lunchtime, and if he had looked up to see what everybody was looking at, the message KYLE COME HOME MA IS DYING was not a call but a warning. Clyde alone could have told them all this but he could not tell them because he would have had to tell them how he knew.
He had traveled. He had seen the world. He had seen just enough of Cardiff and London, Casablanca, Algiers, Palermo, Naples, Rome, Paris and Berlin to dislike them one and all. In none of these, though, had he felt more out of place, and of none did the memory tease and torment him more than New York City, where he went on a three-day pass just before being shipped overseas.
So of all the Renshaws none was more ashamed than he of his baby brother’s leaving home. To the feeling that Kyle was an unnatural son and brother they had all superadded the belief that he was a traitor to his birthplace, which they would not have felt if he had left home for New Orleans or Memphis or even San Francisco. An odor of implication clung to the entire family which had a member “up North.” None, though, was as scandalized by Kyle’s choice of his place of expatriation as Clyde. For, remembering the things he himself had done during his three days there—or able, that is to say, to remember some of them and from these to guess at the rest—Clyde knew as none of the others could know what their brother was up to, what had ensnared him and kept him from ever returning home or communicating with the family again. Some of the others, who disapproved of New York City no less for this, thought of it as a place where their brother might have risen to a station in life from which he could look down upon them. Clyde knew it as a place where a man might sink completely out of sight.
Clyde knew that Ballard and Lester were never going to find their brother, and he dared not tell the rest why. He could not tell the others because against that suspicion they would have defended even Kyle, and from the person who had voiced the suspicion, even their own brother, they would have recoiled in disgust. Acting upon the same prejudice, Ballard and Lester were going to look everywhere except the one section where Kyle might be found, and this section they were specifically going to rule out of consideration. Whatever else he might be—undutiful son, renegade brother, traitor—Kyle Renshaw was still a white man and a Southerner.
Clyde had penetrated regions where neither Ballard nor Lester nor any other Renshaw had entered. Among the sons of—and with one dusky daughter of—Africa, Clyde had explored the jungle in the depths of his own soul. And he envisaged in darkest Harlem a vast preserve where a man might raven unrestrained. Lost in there and gone native, probably under an assumed name, was Kyle Renshaw.… Those thick lips, pouting with passion, those heavy-lidded liquid eyes, the white shading off into ivory, those broad nostrils dilated with desire, firm bodies smooth as onyx, redolent either of provocative perfume or the quick musk of their responsive glands—white women, after a man had known the other, were as dry and insipid as the white meat of chicken compared with the dark juiciness of the thigh.
That until recently was how Clyde had explained his brother Kyle’s long absence from home. Now he had another explanation, similar but different. You could enjoy all that up there and, by detouring around your conscience, still come back home. You could stay at home and do it. He had. There was no place of exile from which there was no way back home—if you were alone. Even to himself Clyde had to say this in a whisper: Kyle had married one. Maybe was raising a family.
> “Naw, sir, excuse me, not meaning to give you a short answer, but no, I won’t tell you my name nor where I come from nor just what I said to that little lady down there in that cellar.” At last the TV reporter had managed to stop one of the mound-mounters as he reached ground. One he could not get the mike away from. “But I will say this. I am a man that did wrong. I give myself up and was tried and found guilty and sentenced to life. After making license plates for twenty-one years the new governor pardoned me. I had paid off my debt to society. Trouble was, I couldn’t pardon myself. I still didn’t feel purged. I joined one congregation after another. Watchtower, Churchachrist, Pentacostals: I tried them all. Whenever I heard of some new preacher I’d throw up my work and go a hundred miles. What I could never find was one I could say to myself, he knows what I’m talking about because he’s been through it. Ask God’s forgiveness, that’s all any of them had to say to me. He will forgive you. And that’s a fact, He will. It’s about like pleading guilty by mail to a parking fine. Today’s preachers have gentled God down to where He’s about on a par with Santa Claus. To get you into church these days they’re ready to give you Green Stamps at the door. What I would like to say to all the folks watching out there on their TV sets, if you have gone from denomination to denomination and preacher to preacher and had them all put you off with words like they done me, then here is the place for you. I got more relief from telling about myself to that little lady down there all alone in the ground than I ever got from all them preachers put together. What did she say to me that give me such comfort? Nothing. Not a word. Not one word. What a comfort there is in silence! Not one lying cheerful word come up that drainpipe. Just a kind of steady low moan. More understanding in that moan, Mister, than in a month of Sunday sermons! Jesus wept, but that was a long time ago. We need somebody to weep for us now. All of us, I ain’t the only one. Mister, if poor suffering sinful humankind is ever to learn to live on this earth it’ll be when a living saint comes among us that instead of suffering for us or because of us, suffers with us. I say we have got just such a saint among us right now. I say she’s sitting right this minute down there alone in her living tomb.”
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