The Morning and the Evening

by Joan Williams

  Then she was gone.

  It was a little while and then he was quiet. He picked up the napkin again and made a stab at his nose. Then he went to bed. Then he got up and came back into the room and blew out the candle. Then he went back to bed again, stumbling in the dark.

  In the morning there was bread and butter and milk again. He ate it. Afterward, he put the dishes in the bucket of water, pulled them out again, and put them on the drainboard. In a little while he went out across the yard to the bathroom and on his way back to the house, he fed the chickens. He was standing in the bedroom, looking down at the dirt covering his pants, when someone came into the room behind him. When he turned around, the man said, “How do, Jake. Earl Metcalf. We uptown decided the thing to do was me to take that cow over to my barn and bring you milk every evenin’. You just ain’t going to be able to take care of no cow.” Then he saw the man go out to the barn and presently walk away, waving the cow before him.

  It was when he had gotten hungry again and eaten all the jelly and crackers that he noticed the dirt again. After a bit, he suddenly sat down and got all his clothes off. Two buttons fell off his shirt onto the floor. He got down on his knees and put his finger on one and pushed it around awhile; then he was finally able to curl it up under his fingertip and slip it into the palm of his hand. He did that with the other one and wadded his shirt up with the buttons inside it. He found clothes like those he had taken off and he got them on, except for his shirttail, which trailed out. Then he started uptown, the wadded-up shirt carefully beneath his arm. He walked slowly at first, but by the time he entered town he had again hit his high, loping stride. When someone spoke to him, he made some sort of sound in return, opened his mouth wide and grinned.

  When he entered the store, the woman said, “We were talking ’bout you just now, Jake. Come on in.” Someone near the Coke case handed him a cold bottle. “I got a boy that’s going to bring you down some groceries every week for fifteen cents,” Miss Loma said. “Then I’ll send a little bill up to the bank in Senatobia every week, and they’ll pay me out of the little money your momma left.”

  “He don’t understand all that talk,” said a man sucking on a toothpick.

  “I know it,” the woman said. “But I feel like I ought to speak it out in public in case there’s ever any question about the money. You know how the government is.”

  “That’s right,” said another lady. She handed Jake a package of Nabs. “And somebody will be taking him a little cooked something now and then. I declare, look at him. He’s got on clean clothes and looks almost decent as she kept him.”

  “What’s that—a shirt? What’s he want?” said the man, wiggling his toothpick to the other side.

  He offered it again; this time the woman noticed it. “You reckon he wants it washed?” Miss Loma said. She took it and opened it, and the buttons fell on the floor. He began to nod his head. “Look, you reckon it’s the buttons?” she said. She picked them up and said, “You want the buttons back on, Jake?” She looked at the others. “Yes, I believe that’s what he wants. I’ll do ’em and wash it,” she said. “You come back for it in a few days.”

  “Now, can you beat that?” the other lady said. “Jake, you got any more sewing, you bring it in. We in the Baptist Thursday Club can all take turns doing it.”

  One by one those who came to the store left again. He sat for a long time on a nail keg near the door. He ate what was given to him and grinned at those who spoke to him. Occasionally someone would say, “You ain’t crazy, are you, Jake? But you ain’t far from it!” and then they would slap him on the back, and he would grin very wide at them. They would say then, “You’re all right, boy!”

  Miss Loma said, “Closing time, Jake. Early on Wednesdays.” He went out the screen door when she held it open. There was hardly anyone in town when he walked through, but those who were there all spoke to him. The filling station was still open, but the last car drove away as he passed by, and the owner disappeared into his house next door. A chicken ran ahead of him in the middle of the road, and he whoosed at it; from out of sight someone called, “You git him, Jake.”

  Then he was turning off the main road and going down the road that led past all houses and on into the silence of the countryside and finally to his own gate. He came up to it and looked ahead at the quiet house. When he entered it, no one was there. No one came all afternoon. When the chickens began to make a racket in the yard, he went out and fed them and then he came in and ate on the baloney and the bread Miss Loma had given him. He found a little pail of milk on the table, and he drank that.

  It was not long before he noticed the day had lessened; the sun had spread out into long, runny streaks of red and gold, and the persimmon trees begun to darken against the horizon. He took his chair out onto the lean-to and propped in it up against the house, his feet hooked into the rungs. He waited for dark, the candle already in his hand, the match laid carefully by. He knew how to give it one good strike and afterward stick it in the bucket of water. It was almost time to light it when he saw the birds again, hovering over the line of trees before they settled in them out of sight. In the garden the weeds had grown, and dark came early in the tall grass. Once he thought he saw movement there, and he leaned forward quietly looking—he thought it might be a dog—but he never saw anything again, and he settled back in his same position.

  When it came full dark, he lit the candle and went indoors. He took off his clothes tonight and lay flat with a sheet up over him when the candle was out.

  Usually he went to sleep quickly. Tonight he lay awake. He looked at his clothes lying in a heap on the floor in the moonlight and in the quiet and dark gradually understood, as much as he could, that no one was going to stay here again. He was completely alone.

  He lay awake as the night and its silence deepened. He had always known silence, but suddenly he was afraid of it. He sat up, startled, and with one terrified, but reassuring cry, called out at the top of his lungs, telling them all, telling everybody, the one thing in the world he did know fully: that as deep as his own silence was, it was nowhere near so deep as hers.

  Chapter Four

  Ruth Edna stood on the porch and watched Jake go down the path to the gate. He could manage her latch and lifted it, passed out to the exact center of the road and tugging up the straps of his overalls, went down the road and out of sight. A rooster ran from the yard after him, pecking frantically as if he had dropped something.

  Ruth Edna glanced upward at clouds sun-tinged and bright as gold, banked in a sky that would have nothing to do with rain. She turned back to the breezeway, reminding herself next time to see about Jake’s straps. Off the breezeway’s other end was the garden where only weeds flourished in the dry ground, and goldenrod, the color of mustard, rose in graceful spikes taller than the corn.

  As she went along the breezeway, Cotter called from his room, where he sat rocking, “What’d he want?”

  Otherwise she would not have stopped. “Sewing,” she said. She held up denim work shirts so worn they were almost white. Sleeves tangled in various ways held them together and suddenly, realizing Jake had been trying to make a bundle, she held them close. Then she smelled sweat, and more. The henhouse, she thought and knew she would wash the shirts too.

  Cotter said, “All you do is sew for him. Why don’t you sew for yourself. That dress you got on has a rip clear down the side.”

  “You tend to your own business. I’ll tend to mine.” Ruth Edna flung across the breezeway to her own room.

  Large and dark, it served them as a dining room as well. All the furniture in the house had been her mother’s, except a cedar chest Ruth Edna had managed to buy. Now she crossed over to it and lifted the lid. She put the shirts inside. On top lay a doll. When Ruth Edna took her out, her eyes, blue as blueing, flew open and stared. Ruth Edna kissed her mouth, a tea rose, pink and perfect. She ran her finger inside little curls coiled like springs and admired again the tiny patent-leather slippers;
a thin strap across the instep buttoned onto a white pearl button no bigger than a raindrop. No one knew Ruth Edna had the doll, and she put her away again carefully. She put out a finger and closed her eyes. Not to would be like burying someone alive.

  Afterward, she touched beneath her armpits with bath powder, changed her dress and was ready to go uptown when she heard a chirpy little voice down the breezeway: “Yoo-hoo. Ruth Ed—na!”

  “In here,” she called, knowing Hattie knew it. She pretended to look so she could peer into all the rooms.

  When she had come in, Hattie stood transfixed. “Ruth Edna! Isn’t that new?” Her eyes darted quickly about the room, at the unwashed dishes, at the unmade bed, at the scraps of Ruth Edna’s dress still on the floor. To her surprise, she thought the kitchen floor had been mopped; then she saw it was just that something had been spilled—the sponge used to dab it up lay nearby.

  Ruth Edna turned before the mirror. “It’s not quite finished. The hem’s just basted.”

  “I see.” Hattie saw the thread coming out. “You going uptown? I am.”

  “Yes. Let’s go.”

  They entered the breezeway and faced across an old apple orchard where the morning sun had just come to rest upon the tops of the squat, gnarled trees. Between the dark glistening leaves the apples hung light green, knotty and hard, and as sweet as they were ever going to get.

  Looking about, Ruth Edna said, “I declare, it’s going to be hot. I best get a towel.”

  She returned to the house, and Hattie crept down the breezeway. She had just gotten to Cotter’s room when Ruth Edna came out another door and spoke right behind her: “He’s there.”

  “Ruth Edna—!” Hattie’s little hands flew to her sparse breasts. Then breathless, she turned and bobbed up and down before Cotter’s screen door trying to see inside his room. “Why! Is that you, Brother Cotter?”

  “Oh, stop all that smirking up your face. He can’t see out through that screen any better’n you can see in,” Ruth Edna said.

  “Why, Ruth Edna …” Hattie said.

  “Don’t pay no mind to her, Miss Hattie,” Cotter said. “She ain’t off right in the morning till she’s had at somebody.”

  “Are we going uptown or not?” Ruth Edna said.

  “Who’s waiting for you there?” Cotter said. “Gary Cooper?”

  “Now, you two,” Hattie said. She was going to say goodbye, but suddenly with the condition Cotter was in, it seemed too final. She cried instead, “Keep alive …!” intending it to be cheery. Then realizing, she sank into herself horrified and fled the yard like a stray being chunked at.

  Ruth Edna caught up with her at the gate. “I declare to my soul, Hattie McGaha. I always have thought your head was stuffed with fruitcake. Now I know it.”

  She wrapped her arms in the towel and folded them across her breasts, mummylike. She went ahead, and Hattie came along behind, a black umbrella opened over her head large as a parachute, covering her entirely except for her tottery legs beneath going along like a pair of old scissors, one barely slipping by the other.

  From the wooden walk Ruth Edna could see their shadows chasing each other on the road below, wavery as water images. If Hattie hadn’t carried that black mortuary-looking umbrella, they could have walked side by side instead of single file like this, looking like fools, she thought. She turned around and looked at Hattie hurrying along half out from under the umbrella, vulnerable as a turtle out of its shell, a smudge in the middle of her forehead. From Cotter’s screen, she’d bet. She called, “Hattie, you got black soot all over your face.”

  “Oh, Ruth Edna!” Hattie cried; her mind jumped backward to who all they had seen, walking uptown. She lowered the umbrella and stood with the handle crooked over her arm like a parrot’s beak, scrubbing at her face with a Kleenex till it fell into shreds.

  Exasperated, Ruth Edna said, “Oh come on. You’re not gettin’ married today.” She went ahead, thinking of a similar incident that happened once in a Memphis department store. She had a prissy little salesgirl who was annoyed because Ruth Edna didn’t make up her mind. Finally she told the girl, “Honey, you got a big black smudge in the middle of your forehead.”

  “It’s Ash Wednesday,” the girl said.

  That got the better of Ruth Edna. She slammed down the thread she had selected and left the store, boycotted it even through a sale on cotton dresses. Then, regretfully, she told Cotter the story.

  “Stupid,” he said. “That’s something got to do with Catholics, not Lowenstein’s Department Store.”

  Ruth Edna could remember now how she had stood, her mouth fallen open, wishing she could kick herself. Anybody in the world but a fool like her would have known that was some kind of foolishness nobody but a Catholic could think up.

  “Hattie, you ever heard of Ash Wednesday?” she called.

  “Ash what!” Hattie called, running forward.

  “Oh, nothing,” Ruth Edna said, satisfied.

  When they entered Miss Loma’s, Sadie Louise Murphy jumped from behind the door, like a scare for Halloween, and cried, “George Edwards is dead!”

  “Oh my!” Hattie said.

  “How’d that happen?” Ruth Edna said.

  “He went out to the barn milking, and when he didn’t come in, his wife went out and found him. He never even got started. The pail was dry as a bone and the cow bellowing. He’d just fallen over. Heart, they reckon.”

  “Did he fall in hay?” Hattie said. “I mean, not in a cow plop, did he? Ooo.”

  “Hat—tie!” everybody said.

  “Hattie, your head’s stuffed just with nuts out of the fruitcake,” Ruth Edna said, almost bitter.

  She went off to the back of the store where the Coke machine was. Miss Loma was stacking cans of creamed corn and said, “Ruth Edna, you got Jake’s sewing again this week?”

  Ruth Edna dropped a dime in the machine. “Yes, why?”

  “I just think it’s my turn, is all,” Miss Loma said, licking back a label. “But it seems like Jake hasn’t learned to take it to nobody but you.”

  “That’s because I’ve done it so much these past two months. I’ve got more time, not having a husband or kids or grandchildren like most folks, you know.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and with a feeling of relief she let them stay; they might well be from drinking the fizzy cola too fast.

  “Whew, I do,” Miss Loma said. “It seems like I got to pee-pee on the run in the mornings to get all done in a day I got to do.”

  At that moment, from the front of the store, someone called, “We just seen Jake coming out of your house, Ruth Edna, when we come by.”

  “Jake?” Ruth Edna said. “I wonder why?”

  “’Cause you got his sewing, I reckon,” Miss Loma said.

  “But he just brought it a while ago. I couldn’t have done it yet.”

  “Well, he don’t know that. Jake don’t know the morning from the evening.”

  “I reckon he knows that much,” Ruth Edna said. She put her empty bottle into the rack like a honeycomb.

  At the front of the store, Hattie, white as a sheet, stood and called, “Ruth Edna, I got to go.”

  “Go?” Ruth Edna came forward. “We just got here.”

  “I know, but I got to go. Listen, I’m in trouble. Bad trouble.”

  “Trouble?” everybody echoed, crowding around.

  “I told you my bantam’s sick. I’ve got the feeling something terrible has happened to him.”

  Without looking at one another, everyone agreed she ought to go home then. “Lord help us,” Ruth Edna said, feeling helpless, and decided she might as well go too. She followed Hattie out of the store and said, “How do,” generally to the men sitting on the porch: the Veazey brothers, Wilroy and several others she didn’t look at long enough to recognize.

  “How do, Miss Ruth Edna,” they said in return, lifting hats. Having collected their mail on the way home to noon dinners, they had stopped to visit a while on Miss Loma’s porch, and the air was s
our with the smell of their sweat, soaked in black circles beneath their arms and in patches on their backs, except on Wilroy, who worked for a coal, ice and ginning company in Senatobia and wore a suit every day. The Veazeys had just come from their bottomland near where the government-built dam was going up. The possibilities of that, Lord! It was said the dam would run over into a spillway where there would be boating and fishing, swimming even! No one had ever dreamed of anything like that near Marigold. Ed Veazey squinted against the blue cigarette smoke in the air heavy as fog, hoisted his pants leg and applied coal oil Miss Loma had given him to his chigger bites. Blushing, Ruth Edna looked away from his hairy white legs; she had always thought Cotter the only one hiding such a sight under pants legs. Tell her men didn’t have all the advantages in this world.

  Hattie hurried away down the walk, the umbrella bobbing along like a cork floating, and Ruth Edna went after her at a half-run, forgetting her towel until she arrived breathless at Hattie’s. Then she drew Hattie into the shade of the weeping willow, holding aside the branches like glass curtains of green crystals, the pointed leaves like little tongues flicking them with sharp edges as they passed. Hattie studied Ruth Edna’s arms and swore in all honesty she did not see a single freckle. “Well, next time, wait,” Ruth Edna said, her mouth drawn into a thin warning line.

  “Ruth Edna,” Hattie said as they went on, “did you see Ed Veazey’s legs?”