The Sleeping Night

by Samuel, Barbara

  Even with his lowered eyes, it was apparent nothing in Gideon had changed in his absence. Women still shopped in flowered cotton dresses, men still gathered in little knots by their cars to talk cotton. He felt their eyes following him.

  What had he expected? He shook his head. Something. The entire world had turned itself inside out, spilling intestines from one corner of the globe to the other. Fifty million people were dead, Europe was almost destroyed, and horrors he could barely comprehend had been unleashed.

  But here, white folks lived in Gideon proper, black folks across the river and down the road in lower Gideon. The library wouldn’t give him a book and he better not try stopping for a beer until he crossed that bridge.

  His walk carried him through a path in the woods by the Coreys’ store, but he didn’t stop. He glimpsed the worn roof through the trees, and the sight brought a surprising clutch of sorrow and . . . what? Nostalgia, maybe. A time lost to him.

  Parker and Angel. Before he left, he would have to stop to see them. On his way out.

  He crossed the bridge into Lower Gideon, black Gideon. Here the houses sat a little bit farther apart, leaving room for chickens and hogs and the occasional cow. Almost every yard boasted the flat of a newly planted garden.

  Nothing had changed here, either. Houses still had need of a good coat of paint. Rickety rockers sat on rickety porches. He took a breath against the pang it gave him, seeing the truth. They were so damned poor. He’d forgotten—poor and proud, or poor and tired, or poor and defeated, but poor. Here and there, fresh whitewash had been applied to a fence or a new screen door hung. Here and there, holes in windows had been patched with cardboard, or pigs had ruined a yard.

  In the middle of the afternoon, there was no one much about. Field workers were planting cotton for the farmers who spread for twenty miles in either direction. Domestics were busy cooking and cleaning in genteel Upper Gideon. Those unlucky or unmotivated enough to have no work at all slept or gathered in the back rooms of the juke joint further down river. Isaiah saw only Mrs. Cane, hoeing in her garden, an apron tied around her dress. She didn’t see him and Isaiah didn’t holler.

  His mama’s house sat as close to the river as the Corey store on the other side, and Isaiah knew if he jumped in and swam across, he’d be able to jog through the woods in a nearly straight line to the tree house he and Solomon and Angel had built. Not that he would, not with copperheads and water moccasins lurking in those sleepy depths, but once he had. He shook his head at the memory. A wonder he hadn’t been bit to death.

  It was plain no one was home in the High house. If his sister had been there, she would have had the radio on, and his mother never worked without singing something. A gentle quiet surrounded the simple house with its polished windows and swept walk. Someone had recently built a new set of steps up to the porch. The new wood gleamed in contrast to the old pine boards above it.

  Inside, Isaiah took off his hat and hung it automatically on the coat tree, pausing at the scent of home hanging so richly in the room, a combination of cooking fat and lemon oil and a hint of his mother’s talcum, an unexpectedly powerful mix, like the sight of the roof of the Coreys’ store.

  Then the nostalgic mood broke with a vicious growl from his belly and he headed for the kitchen, finding two leftover chops, gravy and three biscuits from breakfast. There was even, to Isaiah’s deep delight, half a pecan pie. He wolfed all of it down. Finding himself still longing for more, he scrounged around in a closet for a fishing pole. Time of day wasn’t the best, but he figured he might catch a catfish for supper. Surprise his mama when she got home.

  Geraldine High walked slowly up the road toward home. Her right knee ached with a vengeance, which told her there would be rain in a day or two. It was swollen twice its normal size, and she’d be lucky to sleep tonight with the pain of it. In her shoulders was a weariness born of lifting and folding and scrubbing. With one palm, she rubbed the tight spot.

  The earthy scent of frying catfish drifted out into the early evening air as she walked up the porch steps. Geraldine thought gratefully that her daughter Tillie must have gotten home from the cotton fields early. Maybe a neighbor had dropped by the fish after a good catch. Whatever it was, she was thankful that for once she didn’t have to cook it.

  She headed straight for her bedroom when she came in, unbuttoning her blouse as she went, thinking about the day. Mrs. Hayden’s grandchildren had been underfoot since they’d tumbled out of bed at breakfast.

  “Never met such a pack of undisciplined children in my life,” she muttered, shedding her skirt. They’d run through the kitchen, trompled up and down the stairs and slammed out the back door, scattering their things all over the place. Mrs. Hayden had told Geraldine not to worry herself about the children, to let them pick up their own things. Easier said than done when their toys were on the counters where Geraldine cooked, when their squabbling spilled into the kitchen. Once, she thought, pulling a loose cotton housedress from her closet, once she would have scolded any child in her kitchen, given them an ear boxing they wouldn’t forget and sent them firmly outside with their games. Now . . .

  She sighed. Both she and Mrs. Hayden were too old for all those children.

  In her loose, comfortable dress, she went toward the kitchen, giving her scalp a good scratching. “I tell you, Tillie, I’m going to get after those children tomorrow. Can’t be letting them run all over like that. I’m so tired tonight I can’t even see straight.” She breathed deep. “That cat sure smells good, honey.”

  It was only then that she looked up. And it wasn’t Tillie home from the fields at all. It was her son Isaiah, grown as broad and sturdy as his daddy, looking so such like him (except for his eyes, she thought proudly, those eyes are mine) that it nearly gave her turn. With a little cry of joy, she moved forward, lifting her hands to cup his face. “Isaiah! What are you doing here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was a surprise.” A full, rich chuckle rumbled up in his throat and he scooped her into his arms. “I sure missed you, Mama.”

  His arms were like blocks of wood, his shoulders broad as oak trees. “Put me down!” she protested, laughing. But she gripped him back, relief flooding her. It was good, so good to have her child in her kitchen, lifting her clear off the floor and laughing in her ear. Tears stung her eyes for a minute. They were blinked away by the time he let her gently down.

  He kissed her head. “I figured you might be hungry.”

  Looking at all the food piled up on the counter, she said, “You didn’t have to go all through this, son. I’d have fed you.”

  Isaiah bent to check the cornbread browning in the oven. “Naw, Mama. I ate everything you had in this kitchen when I got home. Had to make up for that.” He pushed her toward the table. “You set down and put up your feet. We’ll eat in a minute. What time Tillie get home?”

  Geraldine waved a hand. “No telling. She may not be home. Girl’s gone wild, Isaiah. Spends most her time over to Harry’s, raisin’ Cain.” She sighed. Her youngest had always been in trouble. She needed a daddy, that’s what ailed her. Now she spent all her time looking for somebody to fill up that empty spot and, when nobody could, drank it away. In one way, Geraldine understood it. In another, Tillie had been better taught than that. She’d come to a bad end one day.

  But that was her second child. This one standing before her, her eldest and her son, was something else again. Not that he wasn’t no trouble, because he sure had been in his turn. Too proud and too smart for his own good and, as she eyed him now, she didn’t see that had changed much.

  Maybe war had taught him prudence.

  Guiltily she thought about Parker Corey. She oughta tell him. But later. Right now, she was going to keep him all to herself and eat the meal he’d cooked for her and drink in the wonder of his presence right here in her kitchen. After supper. There would be time enough then to tell him.

  She stopped for one minute behind him, putting her head against his back. “Bo
y, I missed you more than I can even tell you.”

  “I know, Mama,” he rumbled. “Me, too.”

  They talked all through supper, and he told her stories—safe stories, funny stories, not the dark or ugly ones—then Isaiah cleaned up the supper dishes. Now, his ribs straining after the huge meal, he squatted against the south wall of the house, smoking a Chesterfield. The sound of the river swishing and splashing mixed with the copper-edged notes of a steel guitar in the juke joint—Harry’s—not far away.

  Texas weighed in the air like blood. Isaiah smelled the faint rot of growth on the riverbank, smelled cornbread and bacon fat and somebody baking a chocolate cake. All of it was familiar, the signposts of his childhood. Once, he had taken pleasure in the view of the sky through the branches of cottonwoods that lined the river and clogged the sewers around lower Gideon, had felt his heart pumping in joy at the sound of the music playing down yonder.

  Tonight, he could barely breathe. His nose had learned other scents—lavender and heather and death. Gideon had become like one of the places he’d read about as a child. Real, surely, but without meaning.

  The man he had become could not bow under the weight of this old Gideon. One way or the other, it would kill him if he stayed. His plan had been to see his mother and sister tonight, then head out tomorrow, maybe west to Colorado or California. He meant to pause at the Corey store only long enough to tip his hat before he jumped back on that train and took himself out of Texas. He wasn’t a man that needed lessons taught more than one time.

  But now he’d learned that Parker Corey was dead, had been buried only a few days before. Whatever he said to himself, he knew he’d pay his respects, both to Parker and to his daughter, widowed by the same war that had spared Isaiah.

  Flicking away the butt, he straightened—and started as a figure appeared in the trees beyond the house. He frowned, trying to make out who it was.

  His sister strolled into the light—but not the child he’d left. “Lord have mercy,” he said, shaking his head, for she was six feet tall and broad shouldered, with a ripe, lush figure beneath her worn dress. He whistled, low and long, in admiration. “Honey, you did some growing while I was gone.”

  She whooped and ran toward him, up the steps to throw herself into a back breaking hug, bringing with her a scent of whiskey. “So did you,” she said, and broke away from him saucily. “But while I got better, you just got uglier.”

  A little bit tight, Isaiah thought as she flung herself upon the porch rail. Something tense and wound and hard inside of her. He propped a foot up on the rail and shook a cigarette out of the pack toward her. “That’s all right, honey,” he said with a lift of his eyebrows. “I got all I need.”

  “Little easier to find it someplace else,” she said, dipping her head to the match he held. “Men get to run away. A woman’s always stuck behind.”

  “You wanted to go fight Germans, Tillie?”

  “Bet I’m as strong as most the men you fought with, bigger than most.” She spit a bit of tobacco from her tongue. “Don’t see why I couldn’t have learned to fire a rifle.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t no adventure.”

  She jumped off the rail restlessly, and moved a few feet to stare into the dark. “Maybe. Maybe not. All over now, anyway.”

  He thought of the rubble in the cities, the empty, blasted fields. It would be a long time before Europe forgot. But he didn’t want to talk about the war. “I hear you broke my record for picking cotton.”

  “I sure did.” She grinned, showing straight white teeth and the same dimple Isaiah had. “Mama tell you?”

  “Angel wrote me about it.”

  Tillie stared at him for a minute, smoking, her long, exotic eyes unreadable. “She wrote you letters?”

  He nodded. “I think she wrote every soldier in town.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” she said quietly. Then, “You heard Parker died, I guess.”

  “Mama said it wasn’t but a few days ago. Can’t believe I missed him by so little.”

  “It was a blessing, Isaiah. You better off remembering him the way he used to be. It’s a wonder he lived as long as he did.” She shifted and smiled in memory. “He didn’t think it was so silly I wanted to be a soldier. Told me I’d be a good one—and I would’ve been, too.”

  Isaiah smiled back. “I reckon you would have. Probably better than me—I didn’t like it.”

  “Someday,” she said wistfully. “Maybe I’ll have a granddaughter goes to war someday.”

  He touched her shoulder. “Maybe it’d be better if we didn’t have no more wars instead.”

  “Yeah.” She snorted, then ground her cigarette beneath her heel. “Give me a hug. I gotta get me some sleep before I fall over. I’m glad you’re home, ’Saiah,” she said, hugging him tight. “I really missed you.”

  In the morning, Isaiah went by Mrs. Pierson’s as he’d promised. She tried pressing money on him, and he refused—she’d already sent him a bundle, and he had money saved from his pay through the war. He didn’t need it.

  She offered him a job, rearranging her considerable yard. He gently turned that down, too. “I’m not staying, Miz Pierson. I’ll spend a few days with my mama, then I’m on the next train out.”

  “I reckon you’ll want to pay your respects to Angel Corey at least.”

  He bowed his head. He’d been thinking maybe he could skip out. What difference would it make?

  As if she sensed his hesitation, Mrs. Pierson said, “Her father—”

  “I know,” he said curtly, hands laced together. “He saved my life. I owe him.”

  “I was going to say her father loved you like a son.”

  Which just shamed him that much more.

  After leaving her big house, he cut toward the river where it ran through town and followed it north to the cemetery where Parker had been laid four days before.

  It was an old, old graveyard, the ground uneven with the roots of trees buckling the earth, knocking headstones a kilter in the oldest areas. In the midday sunlight, the air was still and green and quiet, broken only by the twitter of finches fluttering in the branches. He paused, feeling the peace of it ease down his neck.

  As he stood there, wondering if he really wanted to visit a grave or just go on home, Angel Corey came from the town end of the graveyard by herself.

  Isaiah stepped backward, hiding himself beneath the low hanging arms of a pine tree. She came slowly, weaving through the headstones in her ambling way, wearing a simple white dress with a wide collar, legs bare, feet stuck into a pair of slides. She was slight beneath the vastness of the Texas sky, and the pale, fine hair just skimmed her narrow shoulders, straight as if she’d used a ruler to cut it.

  She was older, too. Skinnier. Not a beauty, never that, but still pretty as she’d ever been.

  At Parker’s grave, she knelt, brushing that hair out of her face with an impatient hand, and placed a handful of flowers on the freshly turned earth. Then she stood and let her hands hang at her sides. Isaiah thought she might be talking, but he was too far away to tell for sure.

  She looked so damned alone. Lonely. And it was no illusion. Her husband had been torpedoed in the Pacific three years before and, with her daddy gone, there wasn’t going to be anybody else in Angel’s corner.

  Sure as hell couldn’t be Isaiah.

  What he should do was go on and get it over with, he thought, give her his condolences and get himself on out of Gideon. But he couldn’t seem to make himself move forward. Or away.

  As he watched, she lifted her face to the sunshine and closed her eyes. Little as she was, he thought she looked strong. He swallowed the thickness in his throat, then turned away and walked back toward home the way he’d come, a thousand memories of her presenting themselves to him. Angel as a little girl, and a teenager, as a widow writing him letter after letter, keeping his spirits up. He hadn’t told her he was coming back, either. He’d stopped writing to her once the war was over. It had be
en time to create some distance again.

  Along the way through the woods, he found himself plucking wildflowers. When the worn roof of the Corey store came in view, he left the dimness of the forest to put the flowers on the step, where she’d be sure to find them when she came back home. For a long conflicted minute, he wondered if he ought to just wait for her.

  Tomorrow, he thought, crossing the bridge to lower Gideon, maybe tomorrow he’d be ready to talk to Angel Corey. Face to face, without thousands and thousands miles between them.

  And then, he’d just go on to California, far away from Gideon and Angel and the whole sorry mess that began when he started writing those damned letters.

  — 5 —

  November 25, 1942

  Dear Angel,

  I heard from my mama about Solomon and I’m just writing to tell you how sorry I am. He was a good man, and I can say that in spite of everything that happened between him and me. I’ve been wishing I could have told him I understood why he had to do things the way he did.

  He loved you better than anything on earth, which I think you knew. When my mama wrote me about y’all getting married, I knew Solomon had to be crowing from the rooftops, even if he did have to go to war so soon after. He’s wanted to marry you since you were twelve. So I’m glad (and you should be, too) that he got what he most wanted out of life, even as young as he was when he died.

  Knowing you, you’re trying to think of ways you could have done better with him, married him sooner or worn your shoes like he wanted, or maybe had some children to remember him by. Don’t think of the sad things, Angel. Think of the good ones.

  Sincerely,

  Isaiah High