Some of the men ambled to the edge of the porch and visored the sun with their hands. Harry placed his hand on top of the boy’s head just as the driver, in denim pants, slid across the leather seat and leaned out of the already open window. “Where’s the Caliban place?”
“Up the road about a mile and a half.” Harry took a step down, reached out and rested his hands on the window sill. “Can’t miss it. Looks like three flat white boxes end to end. What you got in back? Rock salt?”
“Don’t see where it’s any of your business unless the name is Caliban.” The men laughed. The driver hesitated for a second, not realizing he had come close to calling Harry a Negro. “But you’re right. Just up the road? Three white boxes?”
“You got it. Salt, you say?”
“That’s right. Salt. He wants salt; I’m bringing him salt. Just up the road, you say? Flat?”
“What he want all that salt for? You know?”
“No, I don’t. He called for it. Ten tons. If he’s got the money, I got the salt. Just up the road?”
“That’s it.”
“Good.” The driver rolled up the window, which being broken would close only part way, slid back across the seat and started the motor. Then he was gone, barreling up the Highway, swirling dust at the road-edge on either side of him.
“That’s a damn funny thing for that nigger to be buying. Ten tons of salt.” Thomason turned to Harry. “Come on, I got something to show you.” He smiled and motioned the man into the store. The boy followed them.
Inside, the storekeeper reached under the counter and produced a bottle of whisky and two thick-bottomed glasses. Harry leaned over an urn of pickles. Next to him, Harold stood on tiptoes, looking with wrinkled brows and through shaggy hair in the direction of a jar of chocolate drops on a low shelf. “Say, Thomason, give me five cents’ worth of them, will you?” Didn’t say nothing to him about it so nobody could hold me to it, but I made the promise to myself. That’s enough.
Thomason took up the ladle, weighed them out—there were only about ten—and put them in a bag. Harry motioned Thomason to give them to the boy, who took them in shocked delight, too surprised to say anything. He began to eat them, closing and reopening the bag after each drop, as if fresh air would ruin them. Harry turned back to the storekeeper: “Wonder what he wants all that salt for?”
Thomason poured two drinks and shrugged. “Damned if I know. Must be good for his farm, else he wouldn’t-a ordered it.”
Harold looked up from his candy. “Papa, that Tucker, the good nigger, you talking about?” Harry felt the boy tugging at the loops of his pants.
Thomason leaned over the counter and spoke down to the boy. “Who told you he’s a good nigger, boy? He’s evil a nigger as you’d want to know.”
Harry felt the boy’s face pressing his leg. He looked down and found him peering up and out at him shyly. They both knew what had happened: he had been told not to use nigger. And too, Harry and his wife did not want him to pick up stray opinions, good or bad, about anything, wanted to know exactly where he learned things. Harry could hear his wife already: “You let that boy stand there with all your filthy-mouthed friends; no wonder he comes in here with crazy ideas.”
“Who told you Tucker’s a good Negro, Harold?”
“Nobody.” He spoke into Harry’s leg. “I just—” He stopped. Harry turned back to Thomason.
“What about another drink?” He slapped the counter so it sounded as if he were driving nails with a hammer.
“Why sure, coming up.” He grasped the neck of the bottle. “But we got to watch for my wife. She always seems to show up—”
Harry raised his hand and pressed back the words. “Harold, go watch for Missus Thomason and say ‘Hello’ when she comes.” He smiled at Thomason. “Real loud.”
The boy went and sat on the floor, pressing his nose against the bottom of the kick-bulged screening. The men clicked full glasses and delivered toasts, raised the liquor to their lips and tossed it off.
“Papa?”
Thomason swept the glasses and the bottle off the counter and placed them quickly but clumsily underneath. Both men stood straight and wiped their mouths.
“Papa, Mister Harper’s coming.”
Thomason laughed nervously. Harry came to the door and put his hand on the boy’s head. “Next time say it’s Mister Harper right off. You about killed Thomason there.” The storekeeper blushed.
They went back onto the porch. Harry leaned against his post; the boy stood next to him. Mister Harper, late this morning, was being wheeled down the center of the Highway by his daughter. When he reached the porch the men lifted the chair into their midst and exchanged greetings with him. Almost at once his daughter started up the street back home. The old man leaned back. “Well, what’s happening today, Harry?”
“Nothing much. A truck—” He started but Mister Harper had turned to Harold.
“How’s Mister Leland, there?”
Harry felt the boy slide in behind him, jamming between his hip and the post: Funny how he don’t like Mister Harper, who never done him no harm. I reckon he don’t understand how a man can be so old and still be human. “He’s okay, Mister Harper.”
They lounged on the porch and talked. Harry embraced the post with one arm, his boy sitting in front of him, a stick in his hand, carving in the cracks at the edge of the Highway and every so often leaning back so his head bumped gently against Harry’s knee. Behind them, the men would ask Mister Harper questions of world events and when he answered, whether they really understood or not, they would nod and grumble. Then, as it neared lunch time, they started to vacate the porch, knowing the old man wanted to be alone while he ate. Soon, his daughter came briskly down the center of the Highway carrying a gray metal lunch box under her arm.
Harry and the boy went into the store and Harry bought their meal. They went around to the back of the store and sat in the sun. When they finished the cheese and crackers and milk in waxed containers, Harry lit one of the cigars Miss Rickett had sent him. He watched Harold as he pretended to smoke a faded yellow straw, and reached over, struck a match, burned the end of it so there was an ash. The boy moved closer to him and rested his head on his shoulder. “Papa, why’d Tucker buy all that salt? You know?”
“No, son.” He drew on the cigar. “Tucker’s strange, ain’t he? I heard tell of him doing stranger things than that even.” Suddenly remembering, he turned sharply. “And say now, what did your mama and me tell you about using nigger?”
The boy cast his head downward, searched the ground between his legs for the answer. “You said…you said not to use it any.”
“You remember why?” Harry did not want to sound too stern: It’s hard for him. Everybody uses it hereabouts. It’s even hard for me not to use it.
“You said it was a bad name and that you don’t call nobody a bad name unless you want to hurt them.” The boy looked up then, anxious to have given the right answer.
“That’s right. Now you remember that, you hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen, Harold.” He turned to the boy, searching for words strange even to him, not knowing exactly why he felt the way he did, but sensing somehow it was right to feel this way and to tell his son these feelings. “Someday, when you get to be my age, things may not be the same as they is now, and you got to be ready for that, you see? If you’re like some of my friends, you won’t be able to get on with all kinds of folks. You understand?”
The boy did not answer. He was looking up into his face, his eyes veiled by his sandy hair.
Harry went on. “You see, I don’t think no word starts out being bad. It’s just a word, and then folks give it a meaning. And it may be you don’t mean it the same as everybody else means it. Like if someone at school should call you a sissy, that don’t mean it’s right off bad to be a sissy; it’s just like sayi
ng your eyes is gray. That don’t mean it’s bad to have gray eyes. But if you call a colored person a nigger he thinks you saying he’s bad, and maybe you don’t even mean it that way, you see?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, Harold. I wasn’t mad at you, you know that, don’t you? Here.” He pushed the wet end of the cigar close to the boy’s mouth. “Now don’t take in on it—you’ll get sick. And for God’s sake, don’t tell your ma.”
He watched the boy holding the cigar between his teeth, making a grimace against its bitterness, but still proud to be almost smoking. Then he took it away. “I reckon we can go on back. Mister Harper’ll be over his lunch by now.” He started to get up.
They were the first to reappear on the porch. Gradually the others returned, stood in small clusters, talking, staring off at birds flying above the low roof tops. Harry leaned on his post, scanning the horizon beyond the town. Harold sat on the porch edge, no longer carving. So they remained, into the early afternoon, listening to the stillness, watching the few passing cars, tourists, with oddly colored license plates, having seen all there was to see in the old French city on the coast, speeding through without realizing they had ignored the General’s birthplace, going on to the capital.
Then they saw the wagon, approaching the town from the north, behind a red horse with a spine, not sagging, but crooked as if it had been rammed out of shape by a sidelong blast from a sledge-hammer, and then they could see the man driving, whipping the animal frantically, as though being chased by ghosts or a thousand angry Negroes, the man as red as the horse from the drinking he had begun to do regularly almost as soon as he had discovered there were beverages other than his mother’s sweet milk. They all heard the popping of hoofs on the pavement as Steward skidded, pulling his horse to such a stop that the reins drew blood from the animal’s mouth, and the iron-rimmed wheels of the troughlike wagon left filings for ten feet. He hopped down from the seat, stumbling in the gutter. “Just seen the God-damnedest thing. How do, Mister Harper, Harry. I just seen the damnedest thing.”
“What did you see—a herd of elephants?” Harry exhaled; the smoke hung heavily over Stewart’s head. The men laughed, but stopped abruptly when they realized Mister Harper was sitting straight in his chair, his mouth closed and narrow as a crease in a piece of paper.
Stewart caught his breath, ignoring the comment and laughter, spoke only to Mister Harper. “Driving by there, coming from out home, I seen him, Tucker Caliban that is—now this is the gospel truth—tossing salt, rock salt, on his field. When I called to him, he wouldn’t answer me. Just kept tossing. Kept filling this satchel hung over his shoulder from a big pile of salt in his front yard.”
Harry drew in sharply; no one noticed. The truck. That’s what he’s bought it for; that’s what he’s doing with it. And there’s some of it right under Stewart’s feet. A few crystals lay at Stewart’s feet, unnoticed and forgotten by the rest, though they too had seen the truck and its bed heaped high.
“What’s that you say—salt?” Mister Harper had leaned forward almost immediately and cupped a hand behind his ear, pushing away a tumble of white hair. “How long ago’d you see this?”
“Long as it took me to drive in here.” Stewart did not think the men believed him and began to sweat, pulled off his dog-eared black hat and mopped his naked head with a crinkled yellow handkerchief. “I swear it.” He crossed his heart with a tobacco-stained index finger.
“Must be so, Mister Harper.” Harry turned to the old man. “We all seen the truck, heaped up full.” The other men nodded.
“I wonder what he’s gone and done that for?” Stewart put one foot up on the porch. Harry felt the boy inch closer to him. “Must be nuts.” Some of the men murmured agreement, but Mister Harper paid no attention.
“Lift me on that wagon.” He pulled himself out of the chair, which rolled back from him, its dry wheels squealing, as if surprised to be no longer supporting his weight. He spread his arms out like a scrawny bird, waiting for someone to help him into Stewart’s wagon. “Stewart, you get in back. I’m commandeering your wagon. Harry, you drive. I want to die in bed, not all twisted around a pole.”
Most of the men had never seen Mister Harper on his feet, and immediately, as if an unknown and distant voice on Thomason’s store radio had announced the coming of a tornado, the streets were filled with running men. Stewart struggled his bulk onto the tail gate. Other men, Negroes too, fetched horses without understanding what they were doing, why they were doing it, or where they were going.
The boy, next to Harry on the wagon seat, climbed to his knees and cupped his hands around his father’s ear so Mister Harper, now being hoisted into the wagon next to them, would not hear. “Papa, I thought he couldn’t walk. You said he couldn’t walk.”
“No, Harold. I didn’t say that. I said that he didn’t think there was anything important enough for him to walk to. Maybe he’s found something.”
Mister Harper was on the wagon seat now, breathing heavily, and Harold moved as close to his father as possible. Harry whispered to the red animal, looking down at its back like a twisted red circus balloon and headed it out of town, past the rows of stores and houses, past the people who had come out of the stores and houses to gape as at a Confederate Day Parade. Many who saw—without word, without explanation—hooked up wagons, saddled horses, started motors and followed the wagon, gazing mesmerized at Mister Harper.
Near the edge of town and to the right the wagon passed the low wind-chapped buildings where Negroes lived. They, too, watched Mister Harper and put aside what they had been doing, stopped talking, and leaving a proper space, formed a line of their own to follow the old man.
A short distance out they passed Wallace Bedlow sitting as broad and black as a coal car on the back of an orange horse the size of a large dog. As always, he wore the white dinner jacket he had won at a pile-driving convention. He pulled up short, turned, and joined the Negro line at its head.
The two groups went up the Highway toward Tucker Caliban’s farm and finally Harry saw in the distance the white farm house, three joined sections side by side, bought and painted the summer before, and behind that the barn, sturdy and faded, and in front the square corral, no bigger than a good-sized parlor, and a gaunt and leafless maple, dead and rotted many years, and the small figure of a tiny man at work in a field that with every wave of his arm took on the white color of an autumn frost.
They sat at the side of the Highway in the wagons, the cars, atop horses and waited for Mister Harper to do something. Elbows jutting from his thin body, he asked Harry and Thomason to help him down and walk him to the fence. He said nothing, did not call to Tucker as he would have to any of the men with him or to any other Negro, but instead leaned against the fence watching the boy-sized Negro at work, almost as if he respected the work being done and would not interrupt until it was completed.
Tucker had finished almost a quarter of the field since Stewart had seen him and whipped the crippled horse into town, and now was close to half done. Across the field Harry could see him, one small speck of white shirt; he wore black pants and was himself black and barely discernible against the darkness of the trees enclosing the farm. Harry watched as Tucker ran out of salt and came slowly toward the house and mound, stepping high over the furrows. Then he was close by, his head lowered, and Harry could see the small features seeming lost on the large head, the steel-rimmed spectacles on his flat nose. If he had gone insane, was running wild as Stewart had suggested at the porch, he did not show it. To Harry, he seemed quiet and thoughtful as if he was doing nothing out of the ordinary. Just like he’s planting seed. Just like it’s spring planting time and he started early and don’t have to worry none about missing the first good days. Just like all of us every spring, getting up early and eating and then going out into the field and tossing in seed. Only he ain’t planting nothing; he’s surely killing the land and he don�
�t even look like he hates it. It ain’t at all like he got up one morning and said to hisself, “I ain’t busting my backbone another day. I’m getting that land before it gets me.” Not running out like a mad dog and putting down the salt like it was salt, but putting it down like it was cotton or corn, like come fall, it’d be a paying crop. He’s so tiny to be doing such a terrible thing, no bigger than Harold even, doing that like a boy building a model plane or working with a little hoe beside his daddy, pretending he is his daddy and it’s his field and his own little son is working beside him.
Tucker was close enough now for Mister Harper to reach out and pound his shoulder. But the old man only whispered, barely heard by even Harry, who stood close by. “Tucker? What you doing, boy?” The men waited for an answer. It had not surprised them that Tucker had not spoken to Stewart before, but they were certain if a man had a tongue in his head, he would answer Mister Harper. Tucker, however, showed no signs of recognition, just filled his satchel. “Tucker, Tucker Caliban.” Mister Harper spoke again to his back. “You hear? What you doing?”
Stewart was already on the second rung of the fence, his face red and twisted. “I’ll teach that nigger some respect.” Mister Harper reached out and grabbed his arm; the men were surprised that both could move so quickly.
“Leave him alone.” Mister Harper turned away from the fence. “You can’t stop him, Stewart. You can’t even hurt him.”
“What d’you mean?” Stewart stumbled after the old man.
“He’s already started something. You can’t do nothing to him now. Even if you were to put him in the hospital, when he got healed up, he’d be out here with that satchel planting that salt.” He let Harry help him to the wagon. “Get me back up there. I might as well watch this sitting down. It’ll take a long time.”
A Different Drummer Page 4