Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

“Humph. Don’t know nothing good,” she growled. “How you, baby boy?”

  “Well, I ain’t no baby no more, that’s for sure.” He laughed.

  “Poor old thing. Got yourself tied down too early, if you want to know what I think.”

  “Can’t afford to hear that, Grandmaw. I in it now up to my neck. Just got to keep on treading water.”

  “The cross, and the strength to tote it, Donny. Look to your Lord.”

  There was a dance that night at the Masonic Hall with a live band from Charlotte. Tadpole was home from Fort Campbell and turned up in his uniform with badges and braid and shit all over him. He and Rochelle danced to “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” while Donny watched, too worn out from yard work to cut in. Rochelle strutted and batted her false eyelashes, her fat swaying. Tadpole stomped his paratrooper boots in time to the music. Rochelle threw back her red wig and laughed a throaty laugh, her eyes meeting Tadpole’s and narrowing suggestively. Donny never saw her like this anymore himself. She was always rinsing diapers in the toilet, hollering at the kids, nagging him for a bigger place, or busting the seams of her maiding outfit. He watched her prancing around in her high heels and stockings and felt himself getting hard for the first time in a couple of weeks. He wondered if he should jump up and drag her out back and stuff it in her, with her leaning up against the wall in the alley, as Leon had been known to do.

  Shit, he didn’t even have the energy to get up out of his chair. He’d spent all day earning money to pay their bills, trying to figure out how to get her her ranch house—and there she was moving her hips against Tadpole’s. He smashed his fist down on the table so that all the glasses jumped, but no one noticed. Goddam, what did that woman want, anyhow? He almost started crying, but Rochelle and Tadpole were on their way back to the table. Instead he smiled and said, “Yall looked real sharp together.”

  He was still thinking about Rochelle’s hips moving against Tadpole’s the next morning as he stood with his hand folded at the end of a pew waiting for the offering basket. Rochelle stood up front in a white robe with the rest of the choir singing, “Don’t Call the Roll Yet, Jesus, Cause I’m Coming Home.” Leon could make money better than him, and Tadpole could make love better. Well, if Rochelle wanted to be married to Donny, she’d just have to find herself some other reason. The Reverend Mr. Stump had just preached on some verses from Ecclesiastes about the need to remember the Lord even when you was young and didn’t have the threat of decay and death hanging over you to reveal the vanity of all things of the flesh. “Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” Mr. Stump had pointed out how you couldn’t run a church on shouting because the spirit came and went, but the electric bills was always with you. You had to run a church on your sense of duty, fortified at random times by the shouting. Donny figured it was the same with marriage. Hard-ons came and went, but the rent didn’t vary. Children had to get fed and washed. But did that mean that sex went out the window once you got hitched? He’d thought being married meant you’d get it regular. It never occurred to him you might not want it regular. Did it mean you got it somewhere else, from somebody not all wore out by all that duty? He glanced at Rochelle’s familiar face and felt loss. But as far as he knew, she wasn’t gone yet. All he had to do to keep her was to get him a raise and get it up. Both of which he aimed to do.

  Walking home, he carried Nicole on his hip. She wore small black Mary Janes and white socks and a starched white dress a woman at the mill had given him. Rochelle wore a pink linen suit and straw hat and white gloves. “You look real nice, Rochelle.”

  “So do you, sugar.” She carried Isaac, alseep in his little jacket and bow tie. Donny suspected she didn’t really think so. If he’d been wearing a Special Forces uniform like Tadpole, or a flashy suit and slouch hat like Leon, or a satin warm-up suit like he used to wear, then she’d be thinking he looked nice. As things were, in his dark suit and white shirt and tie, the youngest deacon, he knew he looked like her uncle. He just didn’t know what to do anymore.

  At work that week he had a dizzy spell. The mill nurse checked him over and told him he had high blood pressure and had better find ways to take it easy. He decided the yard work would have to go for a while, so he consolidated his debts into one loan from Harmony Home Finance Company.

  The following Saturday morning he found himself watching cartoons with the kids. Nicole sat on his lap bouncing and waving her little arms at Bugs Bunny. A commercial came on for a doll that drank from a bottle and wet its diapers.

  “Dat!” Nicole shrieked. “Want dat! Daddy, want dat!”

  As the morning rolled on, Billy or Sue or Nicole registered their desire for each toy shown on the screen—things to ride on, a walkie-talkie, a doll’s house. They wanted them all.

  Abruptly, Donny pushed Nicole off his lap. She landed on the floor and began screaming. Sue and Billy looked at him. It was different from what he’d imagined. When the kids were Rochelle’s mother’s, everything he’d done for them had made him look good. All the women in Pine Woods had exclaimed over what a marvel he was. His own kids, though, ĵust made him feel like a flop. He couldn’t never give them the things they wanted. Couldn’t hardly even give them the things they needed.

  “What you doing to that child?” Rochelle called from the bathroom, where she was bathing Isaac.

  “Ain’t doing nothing.” He stalked to the door. “Going out.”

  “You what?”

  “Out. I’m going out.” He slammed the door on her protests. He meant to take a walk and cool down some, but he found himself heading for Dupree’s.

  “Hey,” he said to the group out front, slapping a shoulder, punching an arm, shaking a hand. He felt real self-conscious, even though he’d known most of these men all his life. He’d generally avoided this scene. But there couldn’t be no harm in him chatting with them, maybe cheering himself up.

  “Who we got here? Why, I do believe it’s Mr. Donny Good Boy Tatro himself!”

  He lounged on the curb for the rest of the morning, while different men went into the shop and emerged with soft drinks or candy bars. Occasionally a bottle of Four Roses in a brown paper bag was passed. Cigarettes were shared.

  A hefty woman in curlers leaned out an upstairs window in the apartment complex and bellowed, “Paul Morton, you get your ass home this minute!”

  “Old lady, you go get stuffed!” he called back.

  Donny listened as the group mimicked her savagely. He’d always done his best to keep the women around him happy. It had never occurred to him to mock them.

  Donny went into Dupree’s to get himself a Moon Pie. On the wall next to Martin Luther King hung a picture of Jack Kennedy, surrounded by a wreath of plastic flowers. Mr. Dupree sat behind the counter slowly fanning himself with the Newland News.

  “What you know good, Mr. Dupree?”

  “Huh?” He looked up from his fanning.

  “Yall right this morning?”

  “Yeah, I reckon.”

  That cat looked like he didn’t know what hit him ever since the voter registration people cleared out last fall. He’d been a big man for a while there, letting them use the room above his luncheonette for an office. He and Mrs. Dupree and various other members of the African Methodist Episcopal church had put them up at their houses and fed them.

  Donny’s grandmaw told about some of them, including Charlene, coming to her place to get her to go down to the courthouse and register. She asked them to leave saying, “I ain’t voted for seventy-six years, and I ain’t studying to start now.” Later she said to Donny, “The idea of a bunch of chilrun coming by and telling me how to run my life! Why, I remember that Charlene wetting her panties while she was jumping rope on the sidewalk right outside this door!”

  But Donny knew his grandmaw had to be against anything the African Methodist Episcopal church body was for. As for himself, he’d tried to stay in good with them all. Hell, he’d be nice to anyone who was nice to him.

 
“… Now, a light-skinned woman, she’ll turn on you so fast …” The talk in front of Dupree’s drifted up into the warm spring air like cigarette smoke.

  “Hell, she’ll turn you on so fast too.”

  “Yeah, that Lorraine, she was something else. I loved that woman, but I just couldn’t give up chasing pussy. Not even for her. So she kicked my ass out.”

  “Well, marrying, shoot. I used to think it was a big deal—responsibilities and all like that. Make a man of you.”

  “Shit, make a motherfucking mouse of you.”

  Seemed to Donny like sour grapes. They couldn’t make it work, so they dumped on it. A couple of the men glanced at him.

  “Where’s Willie at?”

  “Done been inducted. They sending him off to that war over at Asia.”

  “What war, man?”

  “Some war I seed on the TV.”

  “Ole Willie over there at Asia?”

  “That what his mama say.”

  “Well, I guess Asia beats the shit out of Pine Woods, Tennessee.”

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  “Where I gon go, nigger, with no cash on me?”

  “Hitch somewheres. They say Cincinnati, Ohio’s, real nice.”

  Donny couldn’t believe the ease with which they talked of leaving. But the more they talked, the less terror the notion aroused in him. For a few days he tried to stay away from Dupree’s. But it was hard to resist hearing them turn their failed marriages and inability to support their children into triumphs of manliness and courage. The exact opposite of everything the congregation of Mount Zion had been telling him his whole life. Felt like a real relief, and one that was enabling him to keep his nose to that grindstone. Rochelle had gone back to maiding, but was vomiting and bleeding from her pregnancy and seemed tired all the time. He’d of liked her to be able to stay home, but they needed her salary to cover the payments to Harmony Home Finance.

  One afternoon after work she was in the bathroom vomiting. Donny, still in his work clothes, lay in a chair in the living room gazing at Nicole and Isaac as they messed around on the floor. There wasn’t nothing in the world he could do to prevent them from turning out exactly like him and Rochelle. Seemed like the biggest favor he could do was to bash their brains in and get it over with.

  In between heaves Rochelle called, “Honey, when you reckon we could move into a bigger place?”

  Donny leaped up and yelled, “Shit, what do you want from me, woman? I give you every penny I earn!”

  She came out, her uniform stained down the front. “I want you to act like a man again, Donny. I want you to spend time with me and your children. I want you to head up this family, instead of sneaking off all the time to that gang over by Dupree’s. Honey, I want you to laugh and joke with me instead of them. I need you, Donny.”

  He almost walked over and took her in his arms. Instead he growled, “Shit, woman, I can’t head up nothing. I couldn’t organize a fuck in a whorehouse.”

  He stomped out as she shouted, “Honey, please stay here with us this afternoon.”

  “I can’t take much more of her shit, man,” he complained to the others.

  “Yeah, know what you mean, man.”

  He looked down at the sidewalk, littered with cigarette butts, candy wrappers, some shards from a broken Four Roses bottle. He knew every square inch of this sidewalk. He’d played hopscotch and jacks and marbles, had jumped rope, roller-skated, and ridden tricycles and bicycles all up and down its grey pocked length. After his mama left, he’d carefully stepped on each of its cracks, hoping to break her back. His bare feet had slapped along it in the summer. In brand-new tennis shoes he’d sprinted up it in the spring. In rubber boots he’d danced in its gleaming puddles during the winter rains. His mother had done all these things before him. Sue and Billy were doing them now. Yet his own mother, these men he was standing with, dozens before them could just pick up and leave it all behind? Could he? Never mind about Rochelle and his grandmaw and Nicole and Isaac. What about this old grey sidewalk?

  The more time Donny spent in front of Dupree’s, the more time Rochelle spent at Mrs. Baxter’s, leaving the children with Ruby. When they were both home, she talked a lot about which white women had which silver or crystal patterns, which she liked best. She said she loved it when Mrs. Baxter went off to the Garden Guild meetings and she could kick off her shoes and lie on the plush living room carpet she’d just vacuumed, listening to the silence and smelling the lemon and beeswax polish she’d just rubbed on the antiques, knowing the house would stay almost this straight and clean until the next time she came.

  “Yeah?” said Donny. “Well, I’m glad you like it over there so good, Rochelle. Cause over here it’s like the garbage dump.”

  “How would you know? You ain’t never here.”

  “I’m here about as much as you are, mama.”

  They got behind with Harmony Home Finance. Two men came to repossess the TV. Donny sat and watched glumly as they toted it out the door, then he walked over to Ruby’s to pick up the children. He plopped down in a chair and told her about the TV as she shook her head in disbelief.

  Mrs. Saunders from next door came in all upset, explaining that she’d just had news that her son in Vietnam had lost a leg.

  “Law,” sighed Ruby, “I hate to hear that. Seem like they’s trouble all around. Donny gets him the blood pressure. And now they come and cart away his TV set. Lord, Lord.”

  One night Leon was visiting, and Donny and Tadpole went riding in his new yellow Pontiac. Tadpole was getting shipped off to Vietnam the next week. As they drove out the highway through town, a reporter on the radio was describing rioting and looting in Watts. Some cat in the background hollered, “This is for Selma, man!”

  “Who she?” asked Donny.

  Leon and Tadpole laughed. Donny couldn’t figure out why. On the far side of town they pulled into the Barbecue Pit.

  Donny said, “Hey, man, you hadn’t oughta stop here. You cats is been gone too long. They don’t serve niggers here.”

  “You ever try?” asked Leon.

  “Well, no, but you know how things is here. You might as well stay where they wants you at.”

  “Why?” demanded Tadpole.

  Leon turned off the engine, and they sat there for a while. Eventually a white girl in short-shorts and cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat swayed up. She bent over, her order pad poised, looked into the car, then straightened up and walked away.

  “See what I done told you,” Donny mumbled.

  “Well, we’ll just set here a spell, see does she change her mind.”

  “Aw, come on, Leon. Never mind. Let’s go over to Hog Heaven.”

  Leon and Tadpole sat back, grinned, and lit cigarettes.

  Suddenly the car was surrounded by half a dozen white men in Tshirts and khakis. One twanged the radio antenna. Another tried to unscrew the hood emblem.

  Donny sat very still. Tadpole and Leon squashed out their cigarettes, their eyes nervous. Donny was sure his showed pure terror.

  “Something we can do for you fellers?” one said into the window to Leon. He repeatedly flicked open, then closed, a switchblade.

  “We waiting to order,” Leon said evenly.

  “This place, they don’t serve niggers.”

  “I see,” said Leon.

  “Yall some more of them there civilian rights people?”

  “Huh-un,” Leon said. “We live over at Pine Woods.”

  “Sure you do. That’s how come you to have New York license tags.” They laughed. A white hand grabbed every door handle.

  “I live up there, but I grew up down here. I’m home visitin.” Leon inched his fingers toward the key in the ignition.

  “Where’d you get this car from, nigger?”

  “Bet he stole it,” one man announced.

  “I bought it.”

  Donny looked out his window and discovered the man about to open his door was Jed Tatro. Their eyes met and locked. Finally Jed
said, “Lay off them, boys. They really are from Pine Woods. I recognize this boy in the back here.”

  “How come you to stop here if you’re from Pine Woods? You know bettern that.”

  Leon looked at him.

  “I asked you a question, boy.”

  “I forgot,” Leon mumbled.

  “Well, don’t forget again, or you might get yourself hurt. They sometimes put fancy ideas into niggers’ heads up at New York City.”

  They drove off in silence.

  “Bastards!” Leon finally murmured. “Motherfucking white devils!”

  Donny felt rage building. His hands twitched with wanting to be around one of those muscled sunburned necks. He wanted to watch some white face turn pink, then red, then purple. Wanted to see those cold blue eyes bulging.

  “Yall better get the hell out of this place,” Leon counseled. “While you can still get it up at all.”

  Tadpole snarled, “Yeah, man, I see how it is. I get to fight their motherfucking war, but I don’t even get to eat their goddam barbecues.”

  The next morning Mr. Stump preached on the verse “Be not hasty in thy spirit: For anger rests in the bosom of fools.” Donny thought about it as he took up the offering and was alarmed at his rage last night. They beat up Jesus and shoved a crown of thorns on his head. He didn’t fight back. But now two thousand years later, everybody knew about Jesus Christ, and who knew anything about those Roman soldiers?

  He was scared of how much he wanted his hands around some white throat. It was being with Tadpole and Leon. They’d always been a bad influence on him. His grandmaw was right. He didn’t want no trouble. He didn’t want to harm nobody. Besides, he had to take it easy like the nurse at the mill warned or his blood pressure would shoot sky high again.

  Walking home, he decided to do anything he could to make things peaceful. He put his arm around Rochelle. “I’m sorry I been messing up lately, mama. I guarantee you I gon do better from now on. That’s a promise.”

  For the next several weeks he stayed away from Dupree’s. The men called to him as he walked home from work, “Hey, Donny, where you been at, man? You coming over after you change?”