The Yankees saw us and charged, rushing up the hill, yelling. As we shot them they broke into little pieces—they were made of blue ice—and the pieces melted, changing from blue to red blood, flowing down the hill in many rivers.
At the bottom of the hill the blood collected into the gulleys in the soil, forming pools, scabbed over, grew hard, and before my eyes, the shapes of men began to grow up, fully uniformed, fully armed, broke loose their roots, and began to charge once more up the hill toward us.
All around me as I fired at the charging Yankees, our men died, melting too, but only once, into gray pools in which bits of hair and thread floated, pools smelling of garbage, and death, and sickness. Soon there were so few of us it seemed we could hold them off no longer and the General turned to me, tore his head roughly from his shoulders, so I could hear the veins and bones cracking and groaning, the sound of pulling up a handful of grass, and tossed the head to me. His trunk stood facing me. I cradled the bleeding head in my arms like a baby, and all the while it yelled up at me, “Run, boy! Save it! Run for a touchdown, boy!” And as always, always, I would stand tasting a sickness from the pit of my stomach, the blood soaking into the cloth of my shirt until the cloth stuck to me, and I would know I wouldn’t be able to move, would realize already even before I attempted the first step that I was paralyzed from the waist down.
That was the first thing I thought about when those kids left; that God-damn nightmare. I don’t think I’ve thought about it or even dreamed it for about two years. I used to have it all the time when I was younger and was afraid of my father. I knew why I dreamed it; guilt feelings brought it on. I’d get a B on a test and—boom—the dream; I’d forget to do something he asked me and—boom—the dream. But when I got to be a senior in high school, I began to really hate him—that’s about the time he completely stopped talking to Mama, distant and withdrawn, and really a bastard—and stopped being afraid of him.
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about, only it didn’t take as long as it did to tell it. I imagine I thought about that because just standing there in the middle of all that mess, and finding out from the kids how it happened gave me that same sick feeling. I was scared because I didn’t really know or understand what was happening, and when I get scared I get sick. I have a doctor friend at school who tells me I’m a gut-reactor. Some people get headaches; others, like myself, get sick to their stomach.
The dream wasn’t the only thing I was thinking about. I tried to think a little bit more constructively after a while, tried to find some cause, some reason for Tucker doing what he did, like something that had happened to him in the past, that he could brood about, that would get him mad, and the only thing I could think about was last summer, when John died.
But to say just this doesn’t seem like enough. There’s more to a man than the day, and the way he died; there’s his whole life, no matter how dull or unimportant, before that. I’m too young to know much about John’s life firsthand. I knew him only when he was an old man. But when I was a little kid, I’d somehow get my hands on a stack of photograph albums, kept religiously by the Willson women who have carefully collected stray Sunday afternoon pictures, report cards, and scrawled drawings from as far back as anyone would care to remember. In these albums there are pictures of the Calibans too. This is how I knew John, although when I began to look at the albums it wasn’t for John’s sake, rather the old funny clothes, and the square black cars he once tended and drove, and before them, the horse-drawn buggies. The first picture of John is when he is a boy, about fourteen, in front of a brand-new buggy. He is wearing a white starched shirt, which bulges rigidly because his chest is thrust way out. If you don’t know better, you’d think he owns the buggy, but he doesn’t. It belongs to the General. John drove, sitting high on the seat, never having to crack the whip, steering the matched team gently, the reins loose in his hands. He’d just begun to drive the buggy for the General, because John’s father, First Caliban, was already too old, nearly sightless and sat in front of his cabin at the Willson Plantation smoking a pipe and resting. And John, still in his teens, though a man when he drove or tended horses or fixed buggies, is driving now. Glittering on that chest is a diamond stickpin the General had just given him for his birthday; he wore it when he died.
Then you’ll see him with more, newer buggies, and then cars, and finally you’ll come to a picture of him in front of a square-nosed Packard with a great shining grill. He stands with a little boy, who already wears glasses, whose head is too large for his spindly body. Behind the glasses there are great, hard brown eyes, with more in them than should be there. That’s Tucker. And soon Tucker is in front of the cars alone, for John is already too old to drive or crawl beneath and now tells the boy what to do—what to tighten, loosen, or adjust—all John can do is tend the flowers in the garden of the house in the Swells, still as proud when they bloom as he would be if they were his own.
And now I really knew him.
On Saturdays John would put on his best suit, a wide tie with the diamond stickpin the General had given him so long ago, and a pearl-gray hat, and get into the bus at Mister Thomason’s store and ride into the Municipal Depot in New Marsails, making the trip to the Northside where he’d sit in the dark friendly saloons and talk to the old Negro men, who, like himself, were too old to do anything else.
Then, one Saturday in June last summer, I answered the phone and heard the voice on the other end. “Got a nigger here in the depot, old man, dropped dead. What you want me to do with the body?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’ll be right there.”
Tucker, Missus Caliban, Bethrah, and I climbed into the black car. Tucker drove; Bethrah sat beside him, the line of her shoulders well above the back of the seat, a maternity dress sloping straight from her shoulders to her knees like a children’s playground slide. Missus Caliban and I sat in back. She was small and black, was not yet, at fifty-three, graying or growing old, and reminded me of a smooth black China doll Dymphna once had. I felt strange riding with so many Negroes, even though they were my friends.
No one spoke; no one cried. We still waited to see John dead, wished for some mistake, hoped the police had called the wrong house, wanted to arrive at the depot and find a total stranger lying before us.
When we arrived in New Marsails we went to the depot police office. The bus driver was sitting in a small fan-cooled room, a can of beer in his fist, waiting. He was big, balding, and flies seemed always to swarm around his head.
“We’re here to claim the body of John Caliban.”
“Surely.” He pulled himself to his feet, placed his beer can carefully into the circle it had sweat on the table. “Come on then.” He went out of the room and we followed him.
“Knew old John well.” He was speaking to me. “Boarded out at Thomason’s just like every Saturday. I never paid much attention to him after that; only when we got to the depot and everybody’s a-hopping off, I looked up in the mirror before I closed the door, and there he was, sleeping, or so I thought. His head was leaning on the post. So I got up and went on back and shook his shoulder, but I noticed he was sort of cold. I knew then. I says to myself: I ain’t never waking up this old nig—” He stopped and looked at Missus Caliban, who hadn’t even heard him. “This old man, even if I stand here and shake him for the next thousand years. He dead.” We had come almost to the bus. Empty of passengers, it looked ghostly.
“I never touched him after that; no one moved him. I went and found the po-lice and they went through his clothes and come up with your number, was all. Here, let me go around and open the door.” He went to the other side of the bus and reached into the window. The door sighed open.
We found him as he had been left, as he had died, his eyes shut over his life. As we climbed the narrow rubber-carpeted steps, we could see the pearl-colored hat in his lap, and the round patch of bristling white hair leaning heavily on the ch
rome-plated cross bar that separated the back of the bus from the front. Hanging from the bar was a white sign inscribed with thick black letters, which, had his eyes been open, had he been alive and just resting, would have been the only thing he could see.
It was John, but even then no one cried. We were too busy signing release papers, and getting an undertaker down from the Northside, a Negro who had known John. When he came Missus Caliban said to him: “I wants you to do it. That way he’ll look like he looked when he was alive and won’t be stuffed all full of cotton.” After that we drove back to Sutton.
That night I went into the kitchen and sat watching Missus Caliban prepare dinner. I had finally realized John was gone and would never return, had realized this because I had not heard him humming below my window in the garden as he had done almost every day of my life. I remembered then, the long-ago times when I was small, smaller even than Tucker (he had stopped growing at the age of fourteen and I had passed him within the year), and John would take us in his lap, one on each thin knee, and would sing to us and laugh. Now I could only remember him singing and laughing.
And sitting in the kitchen, I began to cry, ashamed of myself because I was almost grown-up, or so I thought and Missus Caliban turned from the stove and tried gently to make me stop, tried to comfort me, but could not stop me, and finally sat across from me, and took my hands in hers, and we cried softly together.
The funeral was in the Northside two days later. The church was a new one, occupied before it was really completed so that the inside walls were no more than cinder blocks painted gray. A small plaque near the entrance of the church stated that the cross had been donated by a woman in remembrance of her sister. It was pale sky-blue with bronze edges.
Very few people came. I realized for the first time the Calibans weren’t very popular among their own people, that their devotion to us and our love for them had separated them from other Negroes, so that there weren’t a great many people who would want to call them friend. My mother and I went; my father and sister did not. I doubt whether Dymphna would have wanted to go to anyone’s funeral; my father would just have been out of place. Bethrah, Tucker, and Missus Caliban were in the front pews, nearest the coffin.
The service was quiet and simple. Finally the time came for a friend to stand and say a few words. He was a tall Negro man with a great bald dome and pocked skin hanging loosely from strong bones. He rose, turned, and began to speak.
“Dear Friends: We’ve come here today to give our last tribute to our close friend, John Caliban.
“The facts of a man’s life ain’t very important, but it seems like they should get said anyways. So, what did John do? Well, he never went into business; he worked all his life for one family, and I knows by the way he talked about them, he liked them, and he never felt like it was a job he was doing for them, almost like he would do it anyways, even if they didn’t pay him. I know he’d want me to say that for him, because he was taken so fast he didn’t have time to say it to them hisself.” Some people turned to look at us and I felt embarrassed, hot and cold.
“And that’s it; we can’t stand up here and talk about all the great things he done, because he never done nothing great. But he was always doing good things. We’ll all remember John because when he come into our lives he was always smiling and happy and made us feel good just to look at him. He was a simple fellow and never done nothing big; he was just around making you feel happy.
“Maybe one thing you could say, and I think he’d want me to say this for him too, was that he was the best man with a horse anybody ever seen. But that don’t really stack him up; I reckon the simplest thing to say is the best thing. John Caliban was the kind of man would always sacrifice hisself to help others. He was a good man and a good worker in all kinds of ways, a gentle soul.”
The Negro paused and someone in the front of the church stood, I thought, to second these sentiments with an amen. Then I heard a high male voice say in disbelief: “Sacrifice? Is that all? Is that really all? Sacrifice be damned!” It was not for an instant that I realized from what part of the church the figure rose, not until I marked the thin black-coated figure, the short-cropped hair on the large head, the steel-rimmed glasses, not until I saw the arm raised and brought down in a motion of disgust, as if to wipe away the words, that I realized it was Tucker.
The church was silent as he pushed his way to the aisle. And now Bethrah too was on her feet. “Tucker?”
He reached the aisle and was heading out of the church, his mouth clamped shut, his eyes blank and hard. Bethrah had excused her way out and followed him, leaning backward against the weight of her unborn child, a look of bewilderment on her face. And then they were gone, and a general buzz filled the church for a second or two, then died away.
The Negro finished, stumbling over his words, his composure and self-assurance broken, and we filed from the church and piled into the cars and prepared to go to the cemetery. Through the windshield of the car that took my mother and me, I could see Tucker and Bethrah ahead of us. They did not speak all the way out.
We took John to the cemetery, and saw him buried, and each of us tossed a rose wired to a green stick onto the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. The undertaker said a few kind words, which did not quite ring true, and we left, came home to Sutton.
I hadn’t said anything to Tucker about how I felt and went to find him later that evening. He was sitting on an old crate in the garage, where he and his grandfather had spent so much time together. I went in and told him I was sorry John was dead. He didn’t look up. His eyes were as dry as small, hot stones. “So am I,” he said finally.
I turned to go, then heard him grunt. “Not another time. This is the end of it.”
“What, Tucker?”
“Nothing, Dewey. Just thinking aloud, is all.”
Two months later he bought the farm, a piece of land at the southwestern corner of what had been Dewitt Willson’s plantation, on which Tucker’s people had worked as slaves and then employees, until my grandfather Demetrius broke up the plantation into small share-cropping plots, bought the house in the Swells and moved the Willsons and the Calibans into Sutton. I couldn’t, still can’t, understand how he ever got my father to sell it.
* * *
—
THAT WAS CLICKING through my mind too after the kids left. But that didn’t seem like a big enough reason for Tucker to have done all this. An old man dies, whom I too loved a great deal, and the last thing he sees is the colored sign on a segregated bus, but that is little more than ironic. I decided it had to be something else, but before I could think about that, I heard the sound of an engine coming over the hill, and then the car itself, new, expensive, a limousine, with a light-skinned Negro driving, sitting at attention and uniformed like a West Point plebe; it slowed and pulled off the road, and I could see the elegantly dressed Negro sitting in back, behind the green glass. The chauffeur stopped, rushed around to the near side, opened the door, and the Negro, a gold cross hanging from his vest by a gold chain, stepped out. He was wearing blue sunglasses.
“God bless you, Mister Willson? I thought perhaps you might come to this place.” He wore a dark-gray three-button suit. His shoes were black and highly polished. He smiled. “I bid you welcome, Mister Willson.” He sounded almost British and there was a quality to his voice that I recognized.
He reached into his breast pocket and produced a cigarette holder and a pack of Turkish cigarettes. “Do you smoke, Mister Willson? If not, do you mind if I indulge in one of the less harmful vices?”
“No. Go ahead,” I stammered.
The chauffeur lit his cigarette and the Negro took a deep drag. “Why don’t you get back into the car, Clement.” He was talking to the chauffeur. “I’m sure Mister Willson will be kind enough to be my guide.”
I couldn’t say anything. He laughed. “Come-come, Mister Willson, pull yourself togeth
er.”
“Who are you?” I struggled out. “Just who are you?” My voice was high and squeaky. “How do you know me?”
He answered without hesitation. “I am quite in the habit of becoming acquainted with the records of those young people I feel show promise. An old habit. As for my identity, why not call me Uncle Tom.” He laughed. “At least it is an old and respected name in some circles. But I see that displeases you. Then I think Bradshaw ought to do. The Reverend Bennett T. Bradshaw. But come, Mister Willson, you know, or shall I say knew, Tucker Caliban quite well, I understand. I would be very grateful for any insight you might have into his somewhat unorthodox personality.”
“What do you know about it?” This was really eerie.
“I would not be so bold as to venture any answer with absolute certainty. You see, I am not truly an expert on the southern mentality, black or white. Admittedly, we have the same racial tensions in the North, but not on the open, primitive, refreshingly barbaric level one finds here. This is why I ask you. You can be an interpreter of sorts, having had some small part of your education in the North, but being also a native of the area. Perhaps my question is too general. Don’t you feel you’re on the site of some significant event?” He gestured widely. “Isn’t there something here that taps in you an epic vein, reminiscent of the Bible or the Iliad?”
I nodded. I didn’t like the feeling of disadvantage he was giving me; he knew so much about me.
“Since I seem unable to secure an articulate answer from you, perhaps we should tour the farm. Perhaps it will stimulate one of the utterances for which your college is famous.” We walked around the farm, stopping at the rubble of what had been Dewitt Willson’s clock, and again at the heap of ashes where the house had stood. After this, we came back to his car. “What do you think now, Mister Willson?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?” I was feeling pretty stupid.
“Mister Willson, you disappoint me,” he scolded. “You were in the depot this afternoon. What did you see?”
A Different Drummer Page 12