The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “No’m. I know. I’s going jes’ as quick as I can, Miz Lessing.”

  By this time Livvie and I were accustomed to the difference in Anna’s speech when she spoke to Mrs. Lessing. I considered it part of our special relation to each other.

  Anna murmured to us: “I’ll see if I can’t find out something. Y’all stay here. And Dewey, you better not stay out in this here sun too long.”

  “Yes’m.”

  We watched her cross the street and go up the block, away from the direction of the rail yard, and toward the old part of town, where the dry goods store and the pharmacy were. She waved to us just before she went out of sight.

  “My mother says Anna’s a faithless heathen,” Dewey said. “I think she’s nice.”

  “I wish Mrs. Lessing would go back to Frederick,” said Livvie.

  We wandered over to Dewey’s house and onto the porch, where we sat in metal chairs. Nothing moved. There wasn’t a breeze anywhere in the world. The leaves hung on the trees, wilting. The hottest day in the history of summer. Dewey’s uncle Harry was on the back porch of the house, talking to her mother. We couldn’t make out the words through the open windows, and we wanted to, so we said nothing, trying to hear. But they were two rooms and a corridor away. Finally we went down and around the house, to where they sat, with a pitcher of lemonade on the little table between their chairs.

  “Hey, kids,” Dewey’s uncle Harry said. “Hot enough for you?” He took a sip of the lemonade, and made a face.

  “You kids stay close,” Dewey’s mother said. “There’s trouble, serious trouble.”

  “We know all about it,” Dewey said.

  Uncle Harry sat forward. “What do you know, little girl?”

  “About the elephant.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That.” He sat back. We waited for him to say more, but he sipped the lemonade and stared off. Dewey started talking about the circus. She had been twice, she said, her uncle Harry had taken her. She went on about what she’d seen there.

  I heard her mother say to Uncle Harry, “I think he’s got himself a lady friend in the next house,” and I stopped listening to Dewey.

  “You’re kidding me,” Uncle Harry said.

  “If I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen him at the back door over there, hanging around her. You know what kind of friend I mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “They’re all so highly … they have no inhibitions where—well, I mean I think it’s frightening.”

  Dewey’s Uncle said nothing for a moment. Then: “Does Mrs. Lessing know?”

  “She’d fire her in an instant.”

  “Well, it’s a small world.”

  “What do you think they’ll do with him?” Mrs. Dumfreys asked, and I understood, with a shock, that they must be talking about Thaddeus Marcus Adams of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore.

  I said, “What did he do?”

  Uncle Harry looked at me.

  “Uncle Harry,” Dewey said. “Tell us about the elephant.”

  He shook his head. “I’m trying not to think about the elephant.”

  “Please?”

  He turned to Mrs. Dumfreys. “I’m not kidding you, the worst noise I ever heard, that scream. I never thought an animal could make such a sound. I mean there was something intelligent about it.” He sat there, with the glass of lemonade held to his lips.

  Mrs. Dumfreys poured more lemonade and said, “Can’t you children find something to do out in front?”

  “What did he do?” I repeated.

  “Who?” Uncle Harry said. Then: “Don’t be impertinent, young man.”

  I started to say the name Thaddeus, but thought better of it. I was afraid I might get Anna Scott in trouble.

  “Dewey, take John and Livvie around to the front porch, please,” Mrs. Dumfreys said.

  “Can’t we have some lemonade?”

  Mrs. Dumfreys considered a moment. “All right, you can have some lemonade.”

  Dewey went into the house and brought out three glasses and filled them from the pitcher. We sat on the back porch steps and drank the faintly stinging, sweet lemonade. The glasses beaded up immediately, and the lemonade looked better than it tasted. After a while, we saw Mrs. Lessing come out of her house and go along the alley on that side, to the street behind us.

  Dewey was rattling on about the lemonade at the circus, and I kept my attention on Uncle Harry and Mrs. Dumfreys.

  “You suppose Mrs. Lessing knows about it already?” he said.

  “She will soon enough.”

  “Would you keep a maid with a boyfriend who would threaten a white wom—” Uncle Harry stopped. Mrs. Dumfreys had caught me listening, and held her hand up. Very softly, she said, “John, you and the girls go play.”

  We walked around to the front of the house. I felt restless and impatient to know more. Again we were listening, trying to hear what the adults were saying, and I thought I heard the word impertinent again.

  “I’m sick of this,” Livvie said. “Let’s do something.”

  “I’m going to the freight yard,” said Dewey. She stepped down off the porch.

  We heard Mother cough from the bedroom window above the side yard. The sound made us pause. But she was in bed, half dreaming. The white lace curtains of the window were still as stone. Beyond the space of the window was the wall clock. It chimed once. We waited. It was as if we were waiting for the sound of the clock again. Or for Mother’s cough. But there was only the murmur of the voices on the back porch.

  “Come on,” Dewey said. “If you’re coming.”

  “You’re not supposed to be out in the sun,” Livvie said. “What about Uncle Harry and your mother?”

  “I’m protected,” said Dewey. “I’m tired of sitting around. They’ll sit out there for at least another hour.”

  We followed her out to the sidewalk and on to the end of the street, and then across to the other side. The rail yard was about a quarter of a mile away, and we went slow—as if to hurry would reveal our true purpose. On one porch, someone darker than Anna Scott sat rocking a baby, the baby crying and protesting. We’d heard the cries a long way away. The woman watched us for a few paces, then gave over to worrying about what was in her lap.

  The train yard smelled suffocatingly of coal and creosote and smoke. There were cars ranged along one wide group of about a dozen pairs of rails—the hold yard, as I later learned—and we went past this, on toward the yard office, where two men stood smoking. They were about the same age, both blond and with the grime of the yard on their faces, smudged where they’d wiped the sweat off. The tall one wore a vest and a short-sleeved white shirt. The other was shirtless, in overalls.

  “We came to see the hurt elephant,” Dewey said to them.

  “Get on out of here,” said the tall one. “The three of you, if you know what’s good for you. Get.”

  We didn’t move.

  “Wait a minute, Jesse,” the other one said. He leaned toward us, blowing smoke. He stared at Dewey. “What the hell, if you ain’t the whitest child I ever saw. Look at this, Jesse. Man, this is the opposite of a nigger.”

  Jesse laughed. “Cal, you’re a crazy sumbitch, you know it?”

  “Watch your language,” Cal said. Then he spoke into Dewey’s face: “Ain’t you the complete opposite of a nigger?”

  Dewey’s lower lip shook, but she said nothing, staring back into the dirty, sweat-beaded face. Up close, I saw that they were both older men.

  “We want to see the elephant that fell off the train,” I said.

  The one named Jesse said, “Well, maybe you can and maybe you can’t.” He had brown teeth, and he spit through them, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had stepped closer to Dewey, who had stiffened without giving any ground. I smelled tobacco and sweat. Jesse said, “You know, I bet these street urchins would taste good on a bed of lettuce, Cal.”

  “I bet they would,” said Cal. He rubbed his stubbled face, then flicked the cigarette o
ut into the cinders of the yard. He brought a pouch and papers out of his shirt pocket and began to roll another.

  “Heck,” Jesse said. “Maybe they ought to see our little party. Might do ‘em good.”

  “You’re a damn philosopher, Jesse.”

  “You watch your language.”

  “Come on,” Dewey said to us. “They don’t know anything.”

  We walked away from them. After a few paces, I turned, and they were standing there, staring.

  “Hey,” Cal yelled. And he pointed. There were more tracks ahead. A small group of men had gathered near one of the empty railroad cars. They were moving with a quickness, as if struggling with something, or trying to lift something. Cal whistled, and gestured for us to go over there.

  “Well?” Dewey said to me.

  “You go,” Livvie said.

  Dewey started, but then turned and came back.

  “I’ll go,” I said. I kept to the edge of the rails. There were other cars beyond this one. I wondered which one held the elephant, and what these men I was approaching must have already done with the one that had died. The grass that bordered the yard was burned in the sun, stained with coal dust. The group of men had become still, their backs to me. I got to within about twenty yards of the car when one of them turned and saw me—a big man in a seersucker suit and a straw hat. He walked a few paces in my direction. “There’s nothing for you here,” he said.

  The backs parted, and in the middle of the crowd I saw a brown man in what had been a white shirt. His face was battered and bleeding—you couldn’t tell much about the features for the swelling of the eyes and the blood on his jaw and neck. The blood was all over the white shirt, which hung on his big chest in shreds. His hands were behind his back. He looked at me. They jostled him, and closed in around him, moving around to the other side of the car. I saw their feet there, a lot of confused motion and straining.

  The man in the straw hat was coming toward me. “Shoo! Go home where you belong.” It was clear that he meant to evict me physically if he had to. I backed away, then turned and ran. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that he was chasing me, big lumbering steps, his arms flailing at his sides. I yelled, and Livvie—who was always faster than I—left us behind, running far ahead. I caught up to Dewey and we crossed the rails, then angled back toward Market Street, through a field of dry knife grass that stung our legs, and big blue stones—quarry stones they looked like—that tripped us up. We climbed the roadbed and stumbled across the rails and down the other side, and went on between the houses, Livvie leading the way. We came out on Market Street, and lay down on the grass of the first lawn, fighting for breath. My heart pounded in my face and neck, behind my eyes. For a long while we couldn’t move or speak. Finally Livvie said, “What was it? What were they doing?”

  “We just wanted to see the dang thing,” said Dewey.

  “Tell us,” Livvie said.

  I said, “I didn’t see anything.” I remember thinking that it was my business, not hers or Dewey’s.

  We were quiet, then. A wagon came up the street, two large drays pulling it, and a boy sitting up on the bench with a piece of Johnson grass in his mouth. The boy looked at us as the wagon came by, and when he lifted a skinny hand to wave, I waved back.

  “I bet the elephant’s already shipped somewhere else,” Dewey said.

  We got to our feet and went along the street. When we reached Dewey’s house, we walked through the airless hallway to the kitchen and out onto the back porch. There wasn’t anyone there. We drank water from the well in back, and poured it over our faces. Then we sat on the porch steps as if waiting for the day to change. My head spun a little, probably from the running, but it frightened me. I felt sick. I watched the windows of Mrs. Lessing’s house, and nothing stirred there.

  Dewey said, “I wonder where they are.”

  “Probably looking for us,” Livvie said.

  “Why did that man chase us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How do I know?”

  We were abruptly irritable with one another. They were looking at me. I wondered if what I had seen might be visible in my face. It was hard to believe they couldn’t see it. I felt it in my cheeks like a bruise.

  Presently, Anna Scott came into the alley from the end of the side street, where Mrs. Lessing had gone earlier. She came slow, her hands knotted at her abdomen. I stepped down to the well with one of the lemonade glasses and filled it with water, then hurried across the lawn to meet her. She had seen me, and paused, her lips parted slightly. She was crying. I saw that she was standing there crying, and I wanted so to touch her. To say something, anything. She ran the backs of her hands over her eyes. I had the sense that I had known all along she would be like this when I saw her again.

  “Hey,” I managed to say. “Want some water?”

  She spoke through her teeth. “Is that how you address a grown-up? ‘Hey’?”

  “No,” I said.

  She sobbed.

  “Anna.”

  Her lips curled back. “You get away from me.” She sobbed again. Then she spit the words at me: “White boy.” Her depthless eyes fixed me there, and held me out. I could almost see them shut down under the black irises. She said nothing more, but crossed to Mrs. Lessing’s back door, and went in.

  “What was that?” Livvie said as I returned to Dewey’s back porch.

  I sat down on the top step, silent, watching where Anna had gone. I guess Livvie knew enough not to ask me again. I think I understood most of what had already happened. And I wonder if it even needs me to repeat it here. Thaddeus Marcus Adams of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore had said something that a white lady considered flippant, and for this had been beaten to within an inch of his life, and strung up on a streetlamp at the border of what everyone back then called Darktown. Some people from his neighborhood had cut him down, and he was not dead, but he was blind, he would never walk without a limp, and of course any kind of life he might have had was over forever. The lady who had been insulted had nearly run him down with her surrey as he came from lunch at a café on Market street, walking toward the railroad yard to see about an elephant falling out of a livestock car.

  The most unusual thing about that day took place in the evening at six o’clock.

  They hanged the elephant. Livvie and I went with my father to see it. Dewey and her mother were there, too. A lot of people from the town came out. It was like a festival. They had got the elephant unconscious with ether, and they put a chain around his leathery neck, and began lifting him on the same freight derrick they had earlier used to put him back up on the train car. He woke as the chain pulled him up to standing on his hind legs, so that it looked like a trick. He screamed, even through the tightness of the chain. It had disappeared where it was wrapped around the neck, but the line of it jutted from the loose flesh, on up to the top of the freight derrick, tight as a piano wire. The elephant’s head was turned oddly to one side, and his screaming thinned out so that it was only a kind of hissing and gasping. The body stretched long, the rear feet were still touching the ground; he was choking slow. They let the chain down again, with a rush, and the elephant was on his knees. I realized again that he couldn’t stand or walk. A man that I recognized as Jesse tried to administer more ether, but it was no use, so again they set the winch going, and the chain tightened and lifted, and they kept it going until the animal looked to be standing upright again, front legs hanging down, back legs supporting no weight, but still touching the ground. An instant later, the elephant emptied his bowels and his bladder, and there was a gasp of alarm and fright in the crowd. I heard Livvie yell, a sound like a cry in a nightmare. I looked at Dewey and her mother. Dewey’s eyes were wide, her mouth open. There was a blue vein forking up her white brow. The chain cranked loud, and startled me. It kept lifting, and the animal’s hind legs trailed awfully through the pile of feces. When he cleared the ground he began to turn in the air, a slow rotation, the chain so tight into the
flesh of the neck that I thought it might separate the head from the tremendous weight of the body. We watched the body rotating slowly, inanimate and limp. But the elephant was still breathing. A veterinarian, holding a handkerchief over his nose, put a stethoscope against the great side of the animal, then looked at the others and shrugged, and they all stood back and waited awhile, trying not to breathe the effluvium of what had come from the body. Twice the process was repeated, at intervals of several minutes. Each time, there was another shrug. Another wait. Finally the vet nodded, with his instrument, and the chain was slowly loosened, the hind legs and quarters settled into the mess, weirdly out of kilter—the two front legs bending outward at a ridiculous and terrifying angle. They stopped the chain, and men began to disperse the crowd. The release of the elephant’s fluids had apparently not occurred to anyone as a hazard.

  But it seemed so now. The crowd was ushered out of the vicinity, and soon Father and Livvie and I were walking along Market Street, toward home. Dewey and her mother were a few paces ahead of us. It looked like Dewey was helping her mother along. Livvie cried softly, and Father assured her that the elephant hadn’t suffered. But we had seen the suffering and we were not calmed by his words. I was carrying in my mind the image of Anna Scott’s crying face, and the blood on Thaddeus Marcus Adams’s torn white shirt. But there was the elephant, too—the stupendous, outsized spectacle of its dying. I thought the world a terrible place, and I thought I had learned this in the space of that one day. I looked at the fading light in the sky and felt my equilibrium shift and go off. It was as if the fever had come back. As I had the thought, Livvie spoke it. “I feel feverish again,” she said.

  Father touched her forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”

  We came to Mrs. Lessing’s house, and there was a light in the window, though it wasn’t quite dusk yet. Mother was on our porch. She walked out to meet us. Mrs. Lessing came out, too. Dewey and her mother were already in their own house, shutting curtains.

  “I’ve had to fire my maid,” Mrs. Lessing said. “I’m afraid she was part of that business up the street.”