“Well, listen,” Audrey said then to Danaitha, up in that pretty room what used to be hers. The rocker chair’d made so much noise against the floorboards that it’d woke Mr. Barbour, who was stamping around the kitchen slamming the lid to the breadbox. He’d turnt up the radio real loud, so Lowell Fulson was shouting “Reconsider Baby” up the stairs at them. They could smell the cinnamon what was boiling round the sweet potatoes and the vinegar bubbling up through the greens. “Y’all have fun with that baby. If you need somebody to mind it, don’t call me. You won’t be able to. I’m leaving town.”
“Don’t know where she thinks she’s going,” Ruth told me, sucking her teeth like the business she’d just finished putting out in the street done let off some bad smell. It’s why I can never be Ruth’s friend—she don’t know a thing about dreaming something up on her own, and she don’t know, neither, how to just stand back and enjoy it when somebody else does. I want to tell her: don’t doubt Audrey. Look at her old daddy. Both of them wanting out of this town, and ain’t neither one of them caring about the fallout. Them Martins is a little bit like wild birds—you can’t never know where one of them’s going to fly off next.
PEANUT
The Friday after Thanksgiving, Ruth Simmons’s daddy fell down dead. Me and Ralph was kind of surprised, on account of we just seent him two days previous, the day a cold rain blew in and knocked the seven big cursive letters off the top of Taylor’s Department Store. That happened in the White part of town but Pauline Burke saw the whole thing on account of she done went to Nessum’s to buy kerosene, and she ran in the Colored store yelling that the Taylor’s sign done fell to the street and broke in two, right between the “Y” and the “L.” I know when she said it that Ralph was fixing to walk me down there to see it, rain or no—Ralph thinks ever day of life ought to be an adventure, and lucky me, he sees fit to pull his girl along with him. Well, we ain’t even fully rounded the corner of Sixth Street when here come Zill Heller busting out the front door of the Tin Cup with Ruth Simmons’s daddy hot on his back, Simmons with the hat on his head what was so old, the inside rim was an oil slick. Two green duck feathers stuck out of the hatband so filthy they was gummed together in places, and the back of his corduroy jacket was so eat up with moth holes you could see the green of his shirt peeking through, and yet still he had the gall to be shooting his mouth off at Zill Heller.
“You want that money back, you gonna have to pick me up and shake it out of me,” he was saying. “I ain’t a bit more giving it back to you than the man in the moon.” Even pulled out his knife, he did, and waved it at Zill, but then Zill threw up his hands and yelled something about G. L. Horst over in Judy and “wouldn’t he be interested in the matter,” and well I guess Simmons must’ve owed G. L. Horst an even bigger scratch of money, because when Zill mentioned him, Simmons closed his knife up with a bothered little click and put it back in his pocket. He pulled the sides of his jacket straight, like he was the one in the right and it was Zill Heller’s face he was saving, and then he walked on down Sixth Street and disappeared in Ophelia Loving’s house. Hiram was at the ice plant until four, and everbody knew it. I just wondered what her and Simmons was going to do in there if that baby woke up from her nap.
It was some of us thought somebody might’ve poisoned Simmons, all the trouble he done rustled up in town, but Ruth’s mama told the coroner the way it happened, all quick like, couldn’t have been nothing but his heart. Said he gave a little yell and fell over—looked like he was dead before he even hit the ground. I wondered why nobody suspected Ruth’s mama in the whole business, but the church collected some money and give it to her to bury him. It was a well-attended funeral, because even though they’d only been in town two weeks, Simmons’d made quite a magnificent impression. It wasn’t that people wanted to pay respects, and not even that they wanted to make sure he was in the ground. More like we all just wanted to get a good look at lightning that hot while it was setting still.
I figured, much as they moved around, the mama would’ve been out of town—bam—just like that, but she stayed on. Matter fact, she got herself a job at the post office, and now she’s the first Negro—man or woman—to deliver mail in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. Twice a day now she comes walking down Queen Street handing over letters and parcels, shuffling and hunched over and looking at people’s feet while she speaks, like she’s still embarrassed by a dead man. That big leather bag they give her is right smart, and she’s got a United States Postal badge slapped right on top of her heart, but the way she tips up to people’s porches and dashes off into the snow soon as she drops the letter in the box, she looks like somebody’s runaway child. She crunches across Grandmama’s sidewalk salt to bring me another letter from Daddy, hands it right into my hand without even looking at my eyes to see whether surprise grabs hold of me, and I think it’s a relief it’s just Ruth Simmons’s mama bringing the mail. Second off, I ain’t sure she’s smart enough to know what “State Penitentiary” means. And first off, she’s new to this town and her opinion just don’t even count.
Cold as the devil’s eyeteeth, but I stand there on the porch for a while, noticing how Daddy—or somebody—licked the flap and sealed it just a little bit off’n its glue, and I have half a mind to run after Ruth’s mama, ask her whether any other house in town gets letters marked “Stanton Wallace, c/o State Penitentiary, Eddyville, Kentucky,” but then I ain’t expecting my daddy has any friends here on the outside: after they heard tell about Mama, seem like everbody in town turned on him overnight. Already, the other men down to the ice plant done cooled it with him; they thought he sounded a little too happy gobbling down those sandwiches he made hisself, and they didn’t trust the look of good sleep on the face of a man who didn’t know where his wife was. Daddy was on his way home from the plant while we was digging around for the rest of Mama’s body, and he made the front porch just as Junebug was walking out the house with Mama’s hand wrapped up in a handkerchief. Junebug was headed straight to the police, so when Daddy spoke, he just walked on past. It was all a mystery to poor little Imagene, and when Daddy walked in the house she turned her big pretty eyes on him and ran to hug his legs. I just sat there with my mouth wide open and nothing coming out.
Grandmama done cried herself to sleep on our couch with her feet propped up on the armrest, and I’d been rubbing her shoulder trying to get her to wake up. But when Daddy just stood there tickling the snail of Imagene’s ear, laughing along with her like he ain’t done nothing, I stood up and dropped Grandmama right to the floor. Bamp, went her head, and that did get her awake, and she sat up from the floor and rubbed the back of her scalp. “You ain’t heard?” I screamed at him. “Get out!” I took the poker from the fireplace and threw it at him, and lucky thing Daddy ducked to his knees, elseways I might’ve been the one going off to the pen.
Daddy ran out the house and off to the Colored store for cigarettes, but Mr. Barnett threw his nickel right back over the counter at him. Daddy went in the Tin Cup to have a drink, but they say when he walked in, the place got quieter than a barn—the laughter on them bar stools just went dead. “We got no call for whatever just came through that door,” said Percy Greer, with his back to Daddy. The owner wouldn’t have him served. “I hope they throw you under the jail,” he said.
Ain’t nobody warned him about the police wagon waiting out front. The whole of Sixth Street watched the White policeman cuff Daddy’s wrist, but the way they was all standing there with their arms crossed, looked like nobody was even afraid for him. The police forgot to duck Daddy’s head down getting him in the wagon, and Daddy hit his face against the door and hollered, but didn’t nobody from Queen Street so much as bat an eye. Didn’t nobody shift their weight to even their legs, nor turn their face to shoo off a fly, nor uncross the gate of their arms to let in answers that shouldn’t be asked for. Didn’t nobody stop looking, not even when the police wagon disappeared three miles down that flat road and then over the curve of the earth. And ain’
t not a one of us seent him since. Nobody gone down to Eddyville to visit, not even his people what live down in Princeton.
I imagine when he gets out, there’ll be people what wants something to do with him now and again. He might get his job back on account of he worked so hard busting fifteen year worth of ice, and he might be able to take whiskey at the Tin Cup again, because really the owner would take money from a Martian, long as it spent. Women. There’ll always be women—even right smart-looking ones—who’ll have anybody. There’ll be women who’ll love Daddy all the more because he’s in need of their fixing. But he’ll never have friends again, not real ones. He’s marked as one of the devil’s for life. Can’t nobody understand why he killed Mama, who never so much as raised her voice to him, and that mess he told those White men down to the courthouse is just plain ignorant. About the onliest person in the world who maybe could’ve made headtails out of any of it was Audrey’s daddy. Too bad for Sonnyboy, Lindell Martin’s dead and gone, blown to bits over in Korea.
The day Danaitha come telling him about the Army’s telegram, Daddy just sat there in his chair and stared at her. Even after she walked back across the street to Grandpap Martin’s, with the belt of her dress dragging the ground behind her, Daddy just sat there—he slid down in his chair and put his head back into the cushion and stared at the ceiling. He looked awfully uncomfortable slouched up like that, but ever time we’d look in on him we could see he ain’t moved not one inch. He ain’t even eat dinner when Mama brought the plate and set it in his lap. Imagene was still a little-bitty thing not really talking, and she waddled over and tried to climb up in Daddy’s lap, but he patted her on the back a couple times and told her to go find me. Me and Imagene started running back and forth across the living room, tagging each other in the porch door and then again in the kitchen, tripping each other and falling down just so Daddy might show some concern, but he ain’t told us to be quiet or even really looked at us. He just sat there, with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the ceiling until it got so dark in the afternoon he couldn’t even see that, and then he got up, cleared his throat, and went about the business of sweeping the kitchen, which is what he’d been about to do when Danaitha knocked. Considering what a shock it was to his nerves when Lindell died, I guess it ain’t so strange that Daddy keeps mailing me all them stories about him. He still ain’t apologized for killing Mama, and he ain’t explained it, neither, and half the letters I just throw in the fire. But sure enough, when I rip open the flap on this one and read past the three paragraphs he done wrote on how the sun was shining just right through the basement window when the warden come down to compliment him for his work in the laundry, here Daddy comes again telling me about Lindell Martin.
“Friends since we played ball together in school,” he wrote. “I had a big pumpkin head and Lindell had a bitty nut perched on his neck, and the joke was we had to be walking side by side just to think straight.” “Bighead” and “Peanut,” he says the girls called them, but their freshman year of high school, they beat out every White basketball team in eastern Kentucky, because the White coaches was so curious to see them play that they suspended segregation for all the winter of ’19 and ’36. Mongtomery County Colored was the first Negro team to go all the way to State, and the coach and the principal and the A.M.E. bishop and damn near every Negro in the county begged them to keep playing, but Lindell’d already got Danaitha pregnant, Daddy wrote, and my granddaddy (who had five young’uns standing shorter than my daddy) had stroked up while he was out shoveling snow and lost all the words he’d ever meant to have. With Danaitha all poked out like a watermelon and old Mr. Martin’s mouth hanging down off its corners like a handlebar, Lindell and Daddy both dropped out of school right when ball season was getting hot. The White people was relieved; look like they donated more coal to the Negro community that Christmas.
The more I read all this in my daddy’s letters the more I’m some surprised, on account of it sounds like the story of a flop. Sounds like life kicked Lindell around, and he just curled up in a ball and covered his head. But you know, at some point Lindell must’ve uncurled hisself and hollered—if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t of never got out of Mt. Sterling in the first place. And so I keep reading, because life done kicked me too, and I want to hear how to kick it back. Well, Daddy said he got hisself on at the ice plant, and Lindell started cutting tobacco. But to hear Daddy tell it, Lindell hated the juice getting in his clothes and the chiggers biting his ankles. ’Course, Grandpap Martin and them always did talk so proper that it would hurt them even to say “how do” in some heat, and Lindell didn’t much like the baling twine cutting up his pretty piano hands, so when the first frost hit the fields, Lindell took his darlin’ little fingers off to Lexington and started fixing cars at a filling station, figuring that the grease would at least keep his hands soft. Come the mornings you’d see him with his heavy coat on, hitching the half hour to Nicholasville Road.
Long about five year, he was able to afford a little piece of car for hisself, and generally he’d chug back to Mt. Sterling after his workday and him and Daddy’d spend the afternoon fixing whatever’d gone wrong with its engine that week. It kept Lindell out his daddy’s house, and my daddy away from the damnation of one little noisy girl and another on the way, and if Daddy’s remembering right in his letters, seems like it was pure accident about the Lyric, because really Lindell was supposed to be home nights keeping up his routine of fixing the car and helping Danaitha drink her bourbon. But one afternoon when the wind was blowing snow into Lindell’s eyes and Mr. Combs was about ready to let him go on home, Lindell happened to pump some Esso Extra for a conk-headed half-breed on his way back to New Jersey. The man rolled down his window and put a bug in Lindell’s ear that Cab Calloway was playing in town.
“The Lyric Theater,” said the mulatto. His eyes were gray like rainclouds. He blew into his closed fist to warm his hand.
“And where might that be?”
“Corner of Third and Elm.”
“No kidding,” said Lindell, and after that, Daddy wrote me, if’n you wanted to see what Lindell and Danaitha looked like in the dark, you’d of had to hike yourself up to Lexington. Audrey was coming up on eleven year, and Grandpap Martin was happy to keep her home Lyric nights to teach her checker games. Danaitha hid her whiskey in her coat pocket so she could take it in the Lyric with her: it was known that the Lyric only let in Negroes aiming to be proper.
Lucky thing they took Daddy with them, too, because Lindell couldn’t much dance and didn’t want to noways. Daddy wrote it all down in the seventh letter he sent me, said he was grinning all over hisself, bouncing around, trying to keep a proper distance from the places on Danaitha’s body he couldn’t help but study. Meantime, Lindell was standing out front of the velvet curtain, looking round the ballroom and laughing to hisself with joy over the big ocean of Negroes, more Negroes in one place than he’d ever seent or even imagined, all of them clapping and moving and spinning each other and having a swank time after a week’s worth of mule work. The big grand piano onstage, eight foot long and shiny enough to give off a reflection of the pianist’s gold rings, got Lindell’s nose wide open. “Hey,” he yelled at Danaitha and Daddy over the noise of the band. “When the show’s over, I want to see what that grandpa grand’s like.” Daddy was on the dance floor with another girl, so close to the stage that the bell of the trombone blew spit over his head: Danaitha was pouring more whiskey into a cup. Danaitha nodded at Lindell when she twisted the cap back on her flask, but Lindell still ain’t asked her to dance.
They did stay quite a time after the band packed up and left. Lindell sat a spell picking out tunes, but then he got all excited about the piano’s guts. He slid his fingers down the strings, then stood up and watched what the action did when he stomped the damper pedal. Without the music, Daddy had to hum while he pretended to swing a skinny girl in his arms, but there was so much happy left over in him, he didn’t complain. It was a lady janitor at
the Lyric that year—she kept her hair short and nappy, but Daddy said if you looked at her from behind you could tell from the fit of her pants—and when she came cross the stage with her wide-headed broom, she smiled with her head cocked to the side like only a woman would’ve.
“You sound right nice there, boy. Shoot, I thought the show was still playing. You belong to one of these here traveling bands?”
“No’m. I just play at church.”
“Well, don’t waste the talent the good Lord gave you at church, boy—you oughta be up there playing with the Duke hisself!” She laughed at her own joke, and they all heard how hoarse and pitchless her voice was, and even my daddy knew that neither it, nor any other part of her body, had ever truly touched music.
“Yes, but,” Lindell said, hanging his head, watching the hammers jump as he struck the chords to “Ko-Ko,” “I’m just some hillbilly two-cent piano player. Some black peckerwood from up the mountain. I ain’t going nowhere.”
The sweeper laughed again. “Don’t you know, boy? All these people what got theyselves orchestras now wasn’t nothing but black peckerwoods theyselves at your age. Duke Ellington, matter fact, come up from some little holler down in North Carolina. Hear tell his daddy was a slave. Everbody got to come from somewhere, boy.”
“But you know, ma’am, he must have gone to New York City to make it big like he did. How am I even to get to Cincinnati when I have a woman and a child to feed?”
Daddy said that sweeper looked up to the corner of the ballroom like it was giving her the answer. Said, “Join the Army, boy. The Army got a band. Good as you can play, they’ll put you to work entertaining them soldiers sure enough.”
Daddy said he could tell she was just talking. It was nary a bone in her body what could’ve felt talent, he wrote, and she ain’t really seent in Lindell what Lindell done seent in hisself, but Lindell was a country boy didn’t know nothing about nothing and, so, wanted to believe everthing. The sad part about it, Daddy said, was that Lindell would die thinking what that sweeper said was true. “Matter fact,” he wrote, and there was a space where his pen had picked up between the “c” and the “t” and I could almost see him setting there, scratching a place between his thumb and forefinger where the laundry starch done dried his skin, “that sweeper’s what made him go strutting off to Korea in the first place.”
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