Out of the Night That Covers Me

by Pat Cunningham Devoto

  That evening, as they sat at a picnic table near the fire, people came by to pat Willie on the head and tell him how good the frog legs were. To Willie, it was all in a day’s work. To John, it was something else altogether. He could hardly wait for someone to compliment him. He imagined himself standing to say, You’re welcome or It was my pleasure. He pictured himself telling them all about catching the frogs, about poling the boat, about using the spear, but no one ever came up to him; no one even knew he was there.

  Later, he and Willie were sitting by the fire, stuffing in the last of the fried fish and frog legs, listening to the hum of voices around them, when it happened. And to make it worse, Tuway was not there to protect her.

  Something set off Willie’s mother. She had been standing at a table close to the fire, using a big butcher knife to gut fish and cut off frog legs. Mama Tuway had stepped away from her side and was serving somebody pole beans and tomatoes.

  Ella screamed. Everyone stopped eating and stared. “You keep them hands to you fat self, nigger.” She swirled and held up the knife like a spear, her eyes wide and seething. “Ain’t nobody touchin’ me I don’t tell to.” Before he could change his facial expression, she brought the knife forward and ripped his shirtsleeve. “And I ain’t tellin’ you.” The man jumped back just in time to avoid getting cut, spilling some of the beans off his plate. He recovered and began to smile.

  “Lookie here what you done to my shirt. What’s got into you, gal? Wasn’t nothin’ but a friendly—” His voice seemed to set her off even more. She changed the position of the knife to hold it in front of her and went at him again, slicing out into the air. “Hold on there, woman.” He backed up more, dodging all the while. Still holding his plate, he began to make a game of it, dancing backward around the fire, dodging his head like a boxer. “Well, come on now, I guess I can have me some with my supper.”

  Her fury made her hopelessly awkward. Each time she tried to get at him with the knife, she would lunge at the spot he had just left.

  He chided, “It just like they say. You crazy, girl.” He lifted his plate to avoid another thrust of her knife. “Crazy Ella.”

  Coming to stand beside John, Mama Tuway caught the eye of two men across the fire and nodded her head toward the man who was dancing to Ella’s tune. They, weary of the scene, put their plates down, got up, and made a move toward him. Immediately, he began to back off, glancing at Mama Tuway. “I didn’t do nothin’. Just funnin’ with her.” He held up his free hand. The men sat back down. Mama Tuway walked into the circle of firelight, took Ella by the shoulders, and walked her to the house. All the while, Ella was protesting like a child but going, doing as she was told.

  Everyone began eating and talking again. Willie sat next to John, staring down at his plate, his appetite gone. “We ain’t never gonna get to no Chicago.”

  Much later, the boys sat on a log near the fire, watching it until the red-hot center had crusted over to a black heap. They waited there for Ella to finish helping the other women with cleanup. The three of them all walked back to their house together. One of Ella’s hands held a kerosene lantern. The other rested on Willie’s shoulder as they took to the trail. She told John to walk out in front of them.

  When they reached the house, she went up first and then let them follow. Inside, Ella lit another lantern, and after she had poured water from the pitcher into the washbowl and dropped in a bar of soap from a dish on the shelf, she told them to wash up good. Then she threw their water out the window and filled it with fresh before washing her face and hands—after that, taking a cloth and cleaning her legs and feet. Willie lay in his bunk, immediately falling asleep. John watched her as she slid the cloth up her long legs. He watched her until she looked up and saw him, and her face turned menacing. He rolled over immediately and turned his head to the wall. After a minute, the lanterns went out. He could hear her undressing in the dark, then getting into bed.

  He thought it was around three or four in the morning when he heard her again. This time, he only lay there listening. Her moss mattress made a rustling noise as she tossed and turned, shifting her weight. He had no way of knowing what was happening in her world, but presently she began to call out, first only sounds, then disjointed words. “Oh no, oh no.” She would be quiet for a while, then say, “Get on out of here,” then another time of quiet. He had almost drifted back off to sleep, when he heard her speak in what sounded like a child’s voice. “You hear me now, what I’m tellin’—it’s my baby doll, not you, not you.”

  The hard breathing began again, just as it had on the first night he had heard her. When she started yelling out, John leaned over the side of his bed and saw little Willie’s hand drop down to save her.

  After that, the night passed without comment.

  CHAPTER 46

  FELT low as I ever felt,” Tuway said. “Tellin’ him I seen the boy get on the train—said he was all smilin’, had him a trunk, look like he gonna stay gone a long time.”

  “And what did he say?” Mama Tuway sat in her porch rocker with her mending basket. She pulled out a sock and a darning egg.

  “Didn’t say nothin’, just sit there shufflin’ papers round on his desk, like he could see what he was doin’. Say he thought Mrs. Vance gonna be mighty sad. Say she set great store by the boy. Course I know he the one gonna miss him most. We was walkin’ home yesterday, everybody we pass say, ‘Where your little shadow, Judge? What come of John, Judge?’ By the time we get to the front steps, he say, ‘I guess he be back in the fall, don’t you ’spect, Tuway?’

  “I mumbled like I thought he would be.” Tuway looked down the path he had just walked. “Leastways, now we got a month or so to figure out what to do with him.” He sat down on a portion of the porch railing not taken up by plants in old coffee cans and pulled out a cigarette.

  “Anyway, the Judge say had I heard Timrod and his people done took off last week with a crop planted in the field. Nobody ain’t seen hide nor hair of him. Judge say everybody know the bank done furnished Timrod ’cause he rentin’ from L.B.”

  Tuway paused to watch her flying fingers lacing the needle over and back with precision born of countless repetitions. Thread filled the worn spot in the sock like a sewing machine at the mill. He wondered sometimes if all the games they played as children—jump rope, slap hands—weren’t just preparations for these adult assignments. Her fingers never stopped tapping out little dances on the sock as she looked at him, waiting for him to continue.

  “Now L.B. in the catbird seat, sneakin’ round sayin’ how sad it is ’cause another one of Judge’s loans done gone bad on him,” he said.

  There was silence as they contemplated.

  “You hear anything ’bout Timrod?” he said to her.

  “No,” she said, and didn’t look at him.

  Tuway struck a match against the porch post. “I ’spect he knowed I’d get on him for leavin’ with a crop in the field.”

  In one quick motion, she bit the thread, pulled the sock off of the darning egg, put it in her basket, and retrieved another. She rethreaded the needle, knotted the thread with thumb and forefinger, and began again.

  He smiled at her quick fingers and got up to get himself a cup of coffee, then came back to sit again and change the subject.

  “Friday, Luther come by the bank. He say he wanted to tell the Judge John done gone off for the summer but it sure would be nice if the Judge was to pay him John’s money, like a paid vacation, and he sure would see to it John got the money.” Tuway laughed. “That man beats all.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Remember when we sent you in to get that job with the Judge right after you come back from Tuskegee? We done it so we would always know what was goin’ on with them white peoples.”

  It had been a good idea ten years ago. She had heard that the Judge needed somebody to deliver fertilizer. It had come from the maid of the Judge’s next-door neighbor. Mama Tuway realized the job was beneath Tuway’s capabilities, but she also k
new that the Judge, from what she had heard about him, would soon come to recognize that. Mama Tuway had spent all the cash money they both had to buy him a new suit, a real silk tie, and a pair of dress shoes. She had learned from the maid next door that the Judge always walked to work each day after dinner. They had planned a chance meeting with the Judge right there on the sidewalk, had planned what he would say, and rehearsed it. “I’m just back from Tuskegee and lookin’ for work.” Did the Judge have any suggestions ’bout anybody needin’ work?

  She knew the Judge would jump at the chance to employ Tuway, and she was right. He had started out delivering fertilizer and cottonseed, but not three weeks later, when the Judge had seen how he kept accounts, how hard he worked, he had asked Tuway to put his suit back on and come to work for him upstairs in the bank as his driver and assistant. It had been just as she had planned.

  The added bonus had come when the Judge started having trouble with his eyes and so became more and more dependent on Tuway.

  From Tuway, she had learned about the finances of everyone in the county. She knew which colored families were in trouble and she could warn them to go on up north or to stay another season. Mama Tuway was much more knowledgeable about the customers, both black and white, of the Planters and Merchants Bank of Lower Peach Tree than its board of directors. When Mama Tuway called someone of the colored community in to have their fortune read, they knew to take heed.

  Tuway took no notice of what she said. It had skipped his mind that they had planned the whole thing in the first place. He had grown to like the Judge for what he was. He didn’t think of himself anymore the way she did, as a spy.

  He continued with his story about Luther, like she had not even mentioned it. “Judge say to old Luther he don’t pay for no vacations when his help don’t give him the time of day to tell him he goin’ off.

  “Old Luther have the nerve to say, right out to the Judge, how come the Judge wasn’t in Biloxi, and the Judge say he didn’t know he have to tell Luther his vacation plans. I almost laughed out loud.”

  He took a sip of his coffee and leaned back against one of the porch braces, remembering more news from town. “But that ain’t the worst thing. They say L.B. gonna try and call a meetin’ of the board. He think he finally got the votes to get rid of the Judge.”

  Mama Tuway had finished another sock and was changing thread. “Them white folks gonna end up killin’ each other.” She began to shuffle through the basket for a different color. “Fine with me, long as me or mine ain’t in the middle.”

  “What makes you think you ain’t gonna be in the middle?”

  Mama Tuway looked up, holding black thread in one hand and a needle in the other.

  “You forget about the furnishin’ everybody got here at the Bend this year and last they ain’t paid out yet?” he said.

  “Nobody ever gonna stay at the Bend but colored. You and me gonna see to that,” she said.

  CHAPTER 47

  FOR John, life at the Bend quickly fell into a routine that gave him some sense of security, if not belonging. Each morning, he and Willie would come to Mama Tuway’s front porch along with everyone else. After she had assigned others their tasks for the day, she would turn to the boys and tell them what to do. Their two main jobs were to bring water for drinking and cooking and to keep a good supply of firewood on hand. When those two things were done, they were given other responsibilities. Some days, they would work in the garden, tying up pole beans or carrying water from the nearest creek to irrigate the vegetables during dry spells. Other times, they were sent out into the swamp to search for herbs and plants Mama Tuway needed.

  “Go on out to the edge of Elroy Clancy’s cotton field, the one closest by the river. Fetch me some of that new red clover in bunches, and don’t come back ’less you have the baby shoots. Don’t want none of them old plants. And if you see some horehound, bring me some of that, too, leaves and stems, no roots.”

  Willie would know where, and they would get in their boat and search until they found what they thought she wanted. When they got back to the house, if it was not exactly what she had in mind, she would send them out to start over again.

  The clapboard wall on the east side of the house was thick with bunches of plants she had tied in bundles and hung up to dry in the sun. Mama Tuway would go each day to look them over and decide which were ready to be taken down and brought inside. At night, when he and Willie were sitting on the porch and there was a breeze, they could hear the noise of the dried leaves chattering up against the boards of the house. “Mama Tuway’s medicine wall,” Willie said. “She cure ’bout anything you got wrong with you. That’s how come we here. She gonna cure Mama so she won’t be so sour ’bout everything.”

  Sometimes in the evening, others would come to Mama Tuway’s cabin for help. When this happened, everyone had to leave the house. The two boys were sent out to light candles along the trail from the Bend into the swamp. Mama Tuway would put on her big black shawl and light all the candles in her room. John and Willie would sit in the swing in the darkness of the porch, not moving a muscle while Mama Tuway greeted her visitors and took them inside. Then all they could see was the faint glow of candlelight through the curtains drawn over the window; all they could hear was the chatter of the dried leaves on the medicine wall.

  Mama Tuway would come out on the porch as the visitor left. She would let the person be gone a good time before she sent Willie and John off with a flashlight to gather up the trail candles.

  Once, a man from the Bend rushed into the swamp in the middle of the day and told her his wife was having trouble delivering her baby. Mama Tuway left, carrying a bag, and was gone two days.

  While she was absent, Willie and John went fishing in the swamp creek or played cards on the front porch of the cabin.

  When she got back, she was furious. She stood Willie and John in front of her, hands resting on her ample hips. “I don’t care if I’m dead and buried, they two jobs you got to do every day, rain or shine, dead or alive, and you know what they is—cut wood and bring water—and I see you ain’t been doin’m, have you?”

  Willie lowered his head and put his hands behind his back in agreement with her that he was a pitiful no-account.

  John, embarrassed that he was the older and had let her down, dared to speak. “But we just thought—”

  “What’s you sayin’ to ME?” she roared, her voice echoing up under the porch rafters and out into the yard.

  Willie, horrified that he was within the vicinity of one so stupid, stepped away from John so as not to be struck by the thunderbolt that would surely obliterate him any second. John was so frightened, he, too, backed away from her, falling backward off the porch steps into the dust of the front yard.

  That day, he cut wood until it was too dark to see, until she finally called him to come get his supper, after everyone else had eaten.

  Sometimes she would send them to help out a farmer over in the Bend who was behind with his crop. It was dubious as to whether she was sending them for their skills as laborers or if she was more interested in getting them out of her hair for a time, but they went with all serious intent.

  The first person they were called to help was a young farmer, Claude Ingram. Claude’s wife had just had the baby Mama Tuway delivered. His land bordered the river and was considered some of the richest soil in the Bend.

  While Claude used a pair of mules to plow between the rows of cotton, John and Willie hoed by hand. Now John felt at ease with his hoe. He would go to the work as if he had done it all his life, clearing weeds from around cotton plants, making sure he had his hat on and that he drank plenty of water.

  At noon, they would stop to have dinner and water the mules. The boys followed along as Claude unhitched his mules and walked them back up to the house and the watering trough next to the well. “Y’all go on and water these here and I’ll tell Lucile we ready to eat.”

  The mules stood in heavy harness, heads lowered over th
e watering trough, waiting. John was not sure what he was supposed to do, having never been associated with mules before, but Willie was right at home. He walked up to the well and began lowering a large wooden bucket on a chain down into its depths. The chain on the bucket was attached to a mechanism made of two pine-tree trunks. One, planted in the ground, resembled a telephone pole with a V shape in the top; the other pole sat perpendicular across its top, wedged in the V. The bucket chain was attached to one end of this pole and a rusty old plowshare was attached to the other as a counterbalance. Every time the bucket went down to retrieve water, it was hauled up again by the opposite weight of the plowshare.

  Willie stood on a wooden box beside the well, not so much pulling as guiding the bucketful of water up to the surface. He then directed John to pour the water in the wood trough that ran from the top of the well down to the watering box for the mules. “Mr. Claude famous for his water. This here well got the best water in all the Bend.” Willie and John took deep drinks out of the bucket after they had provided for the mules.

  The federal government, during the time when Roosevelt was president, had built Claude’s house. Solid wood floors and electricity were conveniences that not every Bender was lucky enough to have. Claude made a noticeable show of turning on the electric light that hung down over the kitchen table on a single wire.

  After the blessing, they feasted on huge portions of collards, cornbread, and beans that had been cooked over Lucile’s woodstove and laid out on a table covered with a bright blue-and-white oilcloth.

  “Course this ain’t the first house we had with ’lectricity,” Claude said as he passed cornbread to Willie. “First one we had, it was over on Ball Road. ’Member that one, Lucile? They run wires to that house, and me and Lucile would stand outside at night lookin’ at the light comin’ from out ever crack and cranny in them logs.”

  “Look like venetian blinds.” Lucile smiled.