Out of the Night That Covers Me

by Pat Cunningham Devoto

  They hadn’t been gone over two hours, yet there was not a stick of furniture, not one box left in the yard. At first, she drove slowly, looking around, saying out loud, “What in the world? I . . . I know it was all here.” Her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. The accelerator churned the old engine until it whined over the ruts. When she stopped the truck, the road dust caught up and rolled over them like a fog. She got out of the truck, taking her gloves and hat off, still searching everywhere for some sign. She raced to the toolshed and flung it open. It was empty. Then she ran around the back of the house. Nothing.

  Uncle Luther was on the porch, leaning back against the wall, his feet on the bottom rungs of the cane-back chair he sat in. She ran past him and swung open the kitchen door.

  John had gotten out of the truck and come to the front steps. He could hear her inside, opening doors and closing them. She came back out to the porch, letting the screen door slam. “What did you do with it?” She stood over him, breathing hard. He pushed the tobacco in his mouth to one side and grinned at her.

  “I,” he said, so pleased with himself, “I made us a deal with Jimmy Mann over at the Trash-n-Treasure in Selma.” He raised the glass of whiskey he had in one hand. “You’re gonna be amazed at what I done.” He held up his hand to keep her from interrupting.

  “I called him yesterday from over at Arlo’s house. He come out here this mornin’ and loaded up the whole thing. Even throwed in a bottle of Seagram’s for me to sip on.” He looked appreciatively at the amber moving in his glass. “That there was a neighborly gesture, don’t you think?”

  “You what?” Her face turned white.

  He was still smiling at her ignorance. “Now don’t go gettin’ your back up. I wasn’t gonna sell him the whole thing, but he said it was all or nothin’.” He took a sip, still smiling. “So I says to myself, What the hell? She wants to sell it all anyway. Might as well get rid of it all right here and now. Make a deal on the whole thing so you won’t have to worry ’bout doin’ it in bits and pieces.” He smiled up at her, giving her a wink. “Always have been a good horse trader,” he said.

  “You sold everything? I don’t believe it.” She turned and jerked open the door to the kitchen and went in again to search. There was silence, and then they could hear her beating her hand on the kitchen table. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it,” she screamed. The door slammed as she came back out.

  He was still up against the wall, just watching her. “Now don’t get on your high horse. Yeah, I sold it, and got a good price, too. I’m a right smart trader, if I do say so.”

  “How much?”

  “A lot better’n you coulda. A woman tryin’ to bargain with old Holland at the antique shop?”

  “How much?”

  “Men was born good traders.”

  “How much?” she yelled.

  “A damn sight more than you coulda got, and it’s all right here in my pocket.” He patted his pants pocket. “Cash money. None of this check-writin’ stuff, cash money.”

  “How much?” she screamed again, so loudly that Shell, playing in the dirt with a few leftover Lincoln Logs, looked up and stared at her. Even Little Luther came around from the other side of the house to watch.

  Luther let the chair drop all four legs to the floor and stood up, still smiling. “Two hundred and fifty dollars. He wanted to give me two hundred, but I said no. For the whole thing, it’ll be two hundred and fifty or nothin’.” He stuck his hand down in his pants pocket. “Two hundred fifty U.S. cash dollars. He even give me a fifty-dollar bill.” He held the money out for her to see. “Lookie here at that. I can’t remember when I done seen no fifty-dollar bill.”

  She let her back slump against the side of the house. “I can’t believe it. After . . . after all the trouble, after all that packin’, luggin’ boxes, payin’ the shippin’.”

  “I know it’s a heap of money,” he said. He was still holding the cash out for her to see. “I figure we can—”

  “A heap of money?” She started to laugh. “A heap of money? ” she shouted.

  “Yeah,” he shouted back. “And I was gonna give you some of it to go out and buy a dress or some such, seein’ as you got it all the way down here, but I ain’t gonna be in the mood to do it with you on your high horse.”

  “Oh no, no, no.” She let her back slide down the wall until she was sitting on the porch floor like a limp rag doll. “This is too much. This is just too much.” She buried her face in her hands. “I had plans . . . I had plans.” She was crying now.

  “What the hell is the matter with you, woman?” He took one last swig out of his glass and then disappeared into the kitchen. They could hear him getting the bottle and pouring another drink. The screen door kicked open. He walked back out, bottle and glass in hand, and took his seat opposite her, staring at her. “All right, you can have most all of it if you want,” he said in a low voice. “I just knowed you wouldn’t be tradin’ good as me.”

  She said nothing.

  He took a long drink. “Hell, half the fun is in the tradin’.”

  Finally, she slowly pushed back up the wall to stand. Her eyes were on fire now.

  “You fool,” she began in a low, quiet tone. Then the sound of her voice rose with each additional word. “You no-count turd. You no-good, no-count, stupid bastard.” Then she screamed. “Mr. Holland told me this morning, this very morning, that he would give me twice that for the secretary alone. For the secretary alone,” she shouted. “How could you be so stupid?” she screamed. “With all that stuff, I coulda made hundreds, hundreds of dollars. We coulda bought a good car, maybe got in a decent house,” she yelled.

  He sat there in the chair, his face ashen as what she had said began to sink in.

  When he got up out of his chair, the glass dropped, but he held on to the bottle. “You watch your mouth.” He took two steps and hit her hard across the face. “Don’t nobody call me stupid.” He hit her again. Her head, accustomed to the blows, snapped back to glare at him. He stood staring at her, then took a drink right out of the bottle. “I . . . I was tryin’ to—”

  Shell was sitting stark still, not moving a muscle. Her eyes were staring at the Lincoln Logs on the ground. Little Luther stood like a statue up against the side of the house, not looking at them, but studying the cotton fields in front of him. John made the mistake of backing away a step or two. The movement caught Uncle Luther’s eye.

  “You.” He wheeled around toward him. “You. You’re the one caused it. If it wasn’t for you comin’ and messin’ in everythin’.” He was off the porch, grabbing for John in such a rage that he let go of his Seagram’s bottle and it rolled off to the side in the dust. Uncle Luther pulled John up off the ground. The boy came nose-to-nose with tobacco and alcohol spitting into his face through yellow-stained teeth. He closed his eyes and tried not to breathe. “I’ll teach you.” He hit John in the face, then threw him on the ground and began to fumble with his belt. The boy sat on the ground, not knowing what might come next. He heard somebody say, “Run, get on out of here,” but he had no idea the instruction was meant for him.

  Now Uncle Luther grabbed John’s arm with one hand and raised his black leather belt with the other. The belt lashed down at John’s bare legs. The pain was so immediate, so amazing, that John caught his breath and could not scream. He tried in vain to move away, but his arm was caught in the vise of Uncle Luther’s hand. Finally, his voice came back and he began screaming, “Aunt Nelda, Aunt Nelda!” There was no answer.

  He caught sight of her figure silhouetted on the porch, watching as Uncle Luther beat out both their frustrations on him.

  “She ain’t gonna help you, boy.” He smirked. He brought the belt down across John’s legs again. “She ain’t gonna help nobody.”

  The boy wriggled like a worm impaled on a hook, trying to get away from the next blow.

  “She’s all the time tellin’ you what to do,” Luther said. “‘Make a crop, Luther,’” he
mimicked. The belt cut into the boy’s flesh.

  “‘Make foreman, Luther.’” The belt crashed down again.

  “Get out there in the sun and work your goddamn ass off, Luther.” This last thought caused Luther to come down on the boy with all his might. The belt ripped open John’s pants and cut across his fanny.

  Now the blows came in rapid-fire succession, John swinging from his arm, screaming when he had the breath to. “What? Please. What did I do?” Uncle Luther beat until he was finally exhausted; then he released the boy, to retrieve what was left in his bottle. He took one last drink and stood there reeling.

  John, on all fours, scrambled to the nearest shelter he could find, the space under the front porch where the cats slept. He crawled in among the dust and the cobwebs that hung down from the porch flooring. One of the cats moved to the side to make room. A roach scurried past his head. He lay there curled up in a ball in the dust, his hands covering his eyes.

  Uncle Luther looked around, found the truck, and headed toward it. He started the engine and roared off, leaving a trail of dust floating up in the motionless air.

  Nelda stood watching the road. Shell and Little Luther still had not moved. John lay under the house, trying just to breathe enough to be able to cry. All was silent except for the fading sound of the truck’s engine.

  CHAPTER 20

  STUPID, stupid, stupid,” Little Luther said, squatting down to look at John, who was still cowering under the porch. “Don’t never move, don’t you know nothin’.” He reached under and grabbed a leg to pull John out. The boy cried out in pain but Little Luther paid no attention.

  “I thought Ma said you was smart.” He had John all the way out and lifted him to a standing position. “You ain’t got the sense God give a chicken.” He took two or three swipes at John’s shirt as if to brush it off. “Always stand still. Like a tree or a rock, not movin’ a muscle.” He inspected John’s legs. “Put some kerosene on them legs.” Then he walked away, disappearing around the side of the house.

  Aunt Nelda was sitting on the porch bench, her head in her hands. Shell was standing beside her, touching the sleeve of her mother’s dress.

  John hobbled over to the front steps and held on to the rotting wooden boards. The pain overwhelmed him now. He breathed in, gulping the air, trying to keep from passing out. After a time, his head began to clear and he tried to look at the backs of his legs. They were streaked with red and seeping thin lines of blood. He couldn’t seem to control his body. It began to shake and he heard himself sobbing.

  As he stood there, holding onto the stairs, trying to outlast the pain, he realized he wasn’t thinking about how much he hated Uncle Luther. What kept coming back to him, what he thought about—the thing he kept hearing over and over in his mind—was what Little Luther had just said. No one, no one, had ever called him stupid.

  Luther was gone almost two weeks. To John, it was worth losing all his mother’s things just to have him gone. It was worth losing all of his toys just to have him gone. He didn’t care that his legs had turned black-and-blue and that it took three or four days before he could walk up straight again. He didn’t care that he had to work longer hours in the field alongside Aunt Nelda and Shell. He was beginning to like sleeping on the dogtrot porch. It was wonderful just to have him gone.

  During that time, they were almost like a family. They would get up early in the morning and all help out with getting breakfast, because Shell and Aunt Nelda would have to go to the fields with them to make up for Uncle Luther being gone.

  It was the first time Aunt Nelda had seen the swamp fields. She had been watching the progress of the cotton planted around the house and had not known what the swamp fields looked like. When she saw, she didn’t say anything, but they knew she was crying while she hoed that first morning.

  After a few days, she seemed to become her old self again and would laugh when Little Luther would mimic his father. They would be on water break, and when it was time to go back to work, Little Luther would take a big mouthful of water and spit it in a long stream and then take a grandiose swipe at his mouth as if he was wiping off tobacco juice. “Now what I’m a-tellin’ you is to get on out there and work your butts off, ’cause we don’t want not one of these here puny, almost dead cotton plants to die of weed stranglin’ ’fore they all die of no water, which is what they gonna do any day now.”

  Aunt Nelda and Shell would laugh at Little Luther’s imitation. John would roll on the ground with laughter. He thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. He had not known Little Luther had any sense of humor.

  One morning while they were in the fields, John had slipped and called him Little Luther instead of Butch. He had braced for Little Luther to come over and flatten him, but Little Luther didn’t seem to notice it, or he let it pass. John looked at Shell and they both shrugged their shoulders in amazement.

  At the end of the first week, they had worked so hard that Aunt Nelda said they would all go over to Arlo Thigpins’s barn for the dancing that went on every Saturday night.

  “You never let us do that before,” Shell said. “You said them wasn’t the kinda people for us to be round. You said—”

  “I know what I said, but we ain’t got a car and he lives close and y’all done such good work this week.”

  “If there gets to be too much drinkin’, I’ll bring y’all on home,” Little Luther said.

  Aunt Nelda raised her eyebrows at Little Luther but said nothing.

  And there wasn’t too much drinking, not that night anyway. They had walked over from their house, about three miles. As they approached, they could see cars and trucks lined up along the road. In the dusk, warm yellow light was streaming from all the windows and doors of Arlo’s barn. Fiddle and guitar music floated out on the cooling air.

  Arlo had a barn dance every Saturday night in the late summer, when the cotton was mostly laid by. He didn’t charge admission, but he did cook up a big iron pot of Brunswick stew out in the open air, and that was ten cents a bowl. Some of the other women had brought cakes, and that was five cents a slice. The men could go around back of the barn and, for considerably more, have a sampling of Arlo’s whiskey—the real moneymaker.

  Aunt Nelda had managed to scrape together ninety-five cents and they all ate themselves silly, running back to her for another dime or five more pennies. Inside the barn, they sat on hay bales and listened to the music and ate their Brunswick stew, which was full of rabbit and squirrel that Arlo had managed to kill during the week. This was accompanied by white loaf bread and Ball jars full of ice tea.

  During a break in the music, one of the guitar players spotted Little Luther and insisted he come up and play the spoons on the next song. John and Shell and Aunt Nelda sat there with mouths open as Little Luther performed for everyone else, all of whom seemed to know already that he was an accomplished spoon player. He finished two or three songs and then came back over and sat down by them, trying mightily to convey an air of indifference. “Well, what you think I done when I come over here with Pa? He won’t let me drink no whiskey.”

  They finally used up their ninety-five cents and started for home in the moonlight, the sounds of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” floating out after them on the night air.

  The day he came back, he never said a word. Nobody said anything. They were all eating supper and tired out after working all day. Aunt Nelda had tried to keep up all the chores as best she could. “We can’t have the bank comin’ round and seein’ us not keep up our end of the bargain. We’ll be out in the road.”

  They heard his truck drive up in the yard, the door slam. Shell ran to the window to see who it was. “Pa.” She hurried back to take her seat. His footsteps were on the porch. No one looked up when he came in.

  He put down the box of Whitman’s on the kitchen table and went back outside, letting the screen slam. Aunt Nelda drank her water and stared at the box. She said nothing, finishing up her plate. Finally, she flipped the top off. It
landed on the floor. Then she reached in and took all the wrapped cherry pieces. After that, Little Luther and Shell, then John.

  The Bend

  HE had spent the first year at Tuskegee letting them get used to him. He had gone to classes, all the classes he could take at one time, and he had applied for work at the school. They had given him the choice of a job in the cafeteria or stoking the furnace in the administration building. He had taken the stoking job. It required that he get up at four every morning, but he didn’t mind. It was warm and quiet down in the furnace room. He would stay for hours after he had finished shoveling coal into the big furnace. There was a sink in one corner of the room. A cracked mirror and a dirty bar of soap rested on a board nailed above it. He would wash the coal dust off and then sit studying and reading at a little table he had set up. Mama Tuway was especially anxious that he do well in math, and he had gotten so he could calculate large numbers in his head.

  He had to get used to electricity and running water, things that he knew about but had not used before. He soon found out that he was not the only one. Many of the other boys from farms around the state were in his same shoes. When he went home at the end of the first year, she delighted in having him demonstrate his skills in math. She would call on him to calculate complicated sums as they were standing with other members outside the church after Sunday services. At the end of the summer, he hated to go back, but he knew he didn’t have a good-enough reason to stay, since he had survived the first year.

  Now, years later, when he looked back on that second year, he realized that if he had been more outgoing or if he had been less shy, it might have turned out differently, but he wasn’t and it hadn’t.

  He took more classes in agriculture and math. The work was easy for him and he was beginning to feel more comfortable.