The Morning and the Evening

by Joan Williams

  “Well, I didn’t look, if that’s what you mean. But I can tell you, men’s legs are all the same.”

  “They are?” Hattie said, astonished.

  “Men, Hattie,” Ruth Edna said, sweeping her arm protectively about her like a brooding hen, “have all the advantages in this world. They can hide their flaws, and they can marry if and when they choose.” Her voice broke surprisingly, but Hattie did not notice. She stood still and said, “I want to see that bird, and I’m scared to, too.”

  “Oh, go on,” Ruth Edna said roughly.

  Hattie rounded the corner of the house and cried, “There he goes!” She went in pursuit and presently came from beneath the house, bony rear first, a chicken feather caught in her hair, presenting the bird dustily. “Look a-here. Sick eye.”

  Ruth Edna stepped back a nose length. “He don’t look no different to me.”

  “No diff-e-runt! Don’t you remember how his feathers used to shine in the sun, all colors of the rainbow!”

  “Well,” Ruth Edna said, thinking he did sort of look like the stuffed owl she’d had in the attic twenty-five years.

  Hattie put the rooster down, and he ran on buckling legs, falling from one side to another, as if there were something in his stomach heavy as a bowling ball. “He’s not long for this world,” Ruth Edna said. “Let’s face it.”

  “But, Ruth Ed—na!” Hattie said.

  “Well, I got to go. I got a sick human to look after, you know. Give him a little whisky in a eye dropper.”

  “Why, I don’t have any whisky,” Hattie said.

  “Hattie——” Ruth Edna said.

  “Well, how much?”

  “Oh, let him live while he can!” Ruth Edna went out to the yard and waved back gaily.

  Hattie stood on the steps and watched her go, an emptiness in her heart. In all fairness, she told herself, Ruth Edna was exactly what Cotter said she was: the meanest woman alive, white or colored.

  Fall was hinted at in the chrysanthemums, budding lavender in Brother Patrick’s yard, in the browning zinnias, in the last of the flaming orange marigolds, their shaggy heads drooping. During the long, overgrown summer the citrus smell of mock orange had filled the air; now that languid smell was lost on an air crisp and sharp with the aroma of leaves beginning to dry. The sky, a blue as pure as the blue of the morning glory, had about it a sheen as white as in the throat of the flower. The sun bounded off the splintery gray-white walk, so blinding that Ruth Edna stepped down from it and walked in the middle of the road. Like Jake, she thought, and half expected to meet him coming the other way. But it was noon. There was no one in the road and no one in any of the five stores. Miss Alma, having left the post office, was in her house next door. At the gas station, Homer Brown’s sign hung out: BLOW YOUR HORN LOUD. It meant he was next door having his dinner. Even the dust was settled. It hung on the trees, overshadowing the road in scoops as neat as if they had been placed there by hand. Chickens had settled into the shade under houses. In her whole vista the only sign of life was a brown-and-white hound curled onto itself in sleep in the middle of the road. Passing the post office, she glanced into the little room and saw in the one chair the old man past ninety who came in from the country to spit in the brass Spittoon. He had just done so and turned and met her gaze, his eyes the same lusterless brown color as the tobacco, the juice hanging in drops on his yellowed beard. “How you, old man?” Ruth Edna said, stepping to the porch.

  No part of him altered. She said, “You reckon we ever going to get a rain?”

  The old man drew his arm quietly, as a bow, across his mouth, lowered his chin, and fell asleep. Sighing, Ruth Edna turned and watched a car approach. It was Wilroy and Mary Margaret, on their way to Memphis. They twiddled their fingers in goodbye as they passed. She tried to think how long it had been since she had gone anywhere in that car and figured it was six months ago to the revival of Rebecca in Senatobia; but then Mary Margaret had carried the whole Wednesday Eve Bible Class too.

  Their dust flying behind settled into an eddy about her feet, stilled itself finally, and lay thick and soft as flour over them. Then she started home.

  In the distance dustless trees were still as the town, still as the road and the yards and the houses with their occupants napping on full stomachs. The sky was blue and the trees turning all colors; browns were in the road and in the spots of the dog that lifted its head now and looked at her. Her world, so still, seemed one of dream.

  Far away down the road, thinly on the still air, came the sounds of children at noon recess at the schoolhouse. Almost without thinking, she went toward the sound, her arms falling weightlessly in time to her walk, past the Methodist church, square as a child’s building block, past the only concrete steps in town, leading up to Miss Loma’s house.

  When she arrived at the schoolhouse, perspiration stood on her forehead like rain. The play yard stretched ahead, vast as a desert to cross and just as grassless. Feeling shy, she crossed it, grateful to the children who spoke to her. She reached the building and pulled open the heavy door, escaped into the dark stuffy interior and followed the locker-lined corridor to steps in the distance, descended them as the cool concrete smell of the basement and the smell of spaghetti sauce rose to meet her.

  In far corners of the cafeteria two girls, their hair straggling out of nets, wiped tables to a sticky cleanness. Ruth Edna crossed the room to the steam table and looked down into deep aluminum wells dried with spaghetti sauce; then she looked up at the two women who stood behind them with dripping faces. “Whew, you-all sure picked a hot day for spaghetti,” she said.

  “Afternoon, Miss Ruth Edna,” said one woman.

  “We run out of thinking up things to eat,” said the other. “No two kids like the same thing anyway.”

  “Is that a fact?” Ruth Edna said. She looked into the kitchen. “How you, Waddie Mae?”

  Waddie Mae, washing dishes, said, “All right, Miss Ruth Edna. How you?”

  “Doing all right, I reckon. Hot.”

  “Huh, you don’t know nothing,” said one woman. She unbuttoned her uniform, exposing a wet pink slip, and disappeared into the closet to change; she could hear from there.

  “I was just passing. I wondered if you-all might be shorthanded. I could help out,” Ruth Edna said.

  “Why, you’re mighty sweet, Miss Ruth Edna,” said the remaining woman. “But we ain’t got any funds to hire more help.”

  “I don’t need no salary really.”

  In the kitchen, Waddie Mae took her hands out of the water and listened.

  “I’m sorry——” the woman said.

  “It don’t make any difference,” Ruth Edna said. Her fingers clutched at the pink roses bordering her dress. Now she heard the silence in the closet, in the kitchen, in the far corners of the room. When she turned, the girls bent to their wiping again. “I better get on.”

  “Come eat lunch with us some day,” the woman said. “We got so many potatoes from the government they’re rottin’ back there. The government ain’t got sense God give a flea. Waddie Mae, you take you home a sackful today, hear?”

  “Oh, I might do it sometime,” Ruth Edna said.

  She threaded her way out among the empty tables in total silence. Before the door fell to, she heard the woman come out of the closet and say, “It’s a shame she’s so——”

  “Shhh,” the other woman said.

  Heads bent to their desks, children raised cautious eyes toward her from beyond the glass of the doors. She kept her eyes straight ahead until she reached the yard again, a relief after the stale interior. On the empty, quiet playground only a patent-leather belt lay, lost. About her the whole countryside was quiet.

  Let ’em laugh, she thought, stepping up onto the walk. She had decided on a short way home, not wanting to be again the only person in town at noon. Her way led across pasture land and along a barbed-wire fence. In the whole of the way she would walk there was but one tree, an enormous maple just beginning to yello
w for autumn. Beyond, ranged along a high bank, was the back of town, like a miniature of itself. She saw Miss Alma, a tiny figure, come to her back door and throw out a basin of water. Ruth Edna made her way toward the tree and stood on the side of it away from town, withdrew from the bosom of her dress a bottle containing the last of two ounces of paregoric, all you could get from the drugstore in Senatobia without a prescription.

  There was a Negro man who got it for her as often as he could without arousing suspicion. His name was Little T., and she paid him a quarter for doing it. He was trying to save up enough money to buy a fishing lure, but it seemed to Ruth Edna he never got ahead. She was sorry for him, but it suited her purposes fine. She drank the medicine and stood shuddering until the moment of its taste was over, telling herself again, It’s all Poppa’s fault.

  At forty-nine, he had had a stroke and for ten years had been her care, no more than a baby. Momma, from the first, had surrendered herself to despair. Memory as well as paregoric made Ruth Edna nauseous now; his diapers particularly had repelled her. Cotter, working in the fields in those days, had rested when he came home, but her work never ended.

  Poppa had ruined other men for her, he had been so disgusting. (She was ashamed of the word, but was there another?) He cried out when she changed his diapers as if the whole sorrow of his sickness lay there. Once he even reached toward her in such a way she drew back instinctively, horrified. Afterward she told herself it couldn’t have been; you never knew for sure what he wanted; he had lost the power of speech too. Despite his sickness, the end came unexpectedly. About to serve him breakfast one morning, she saw him slip away in an instant, just like that. It had haunted her for years that all she thought in the moment afterward was, If this isn’t just like something that would happen to me. She had spent the previous day in its entirety peeling, coring, cooking enough apples to make him sauce for six weeks. Too innocuous for anyone else, it had remained on the shelf to spoil in its own time.

  But nothing had ended with Poppa’s death; Momma started in immediately. She stopped eating, saying first it was because her teeth didn’t fit; next it was because her bowels couldn’t pass anything. All that had been really wrong was, she was nutty as a fruitcake.

  As soon as she got Momma to the grave, Cotter started. He said something was wrong with his chest. All her life had been waiting on other people. She’d never done anything in the world she wanted to do.

  She had not cried when either of them died. But now in this lonesome lowering afternoon, thinking of ghosts, she was overcome with regret at her bitterness during those lost years. She cried aloud, longingly, after thirty-four years of silence, Poppa! Momma! and she forgave them at that instant not only their illnesses but their deaths as well.

  Now she was drowsy and should be home. She started, and uptown Homer Brown’s fice spotted her and came tremulously to the edge of the bank, barking shrilly. She hurried away in the opposite direction, following a faint path through recently crushed grass without knowing where the path was going. She was surprised, rounding a gully, to come upon Jake’s house.

  Black against the sun’s angle, it stood, weather-beaten, like a discarded bird’s house: small, oblong, unpainted. Against the golden afternoon the windows reflected round and black as holes; they seemed to know only what was inside them, like the eyes of the old.

  Through one she glimpsed Jake a moment before she went on, her heart caught in her throat. Of all the people in the world, perhaps only Jake was worse off than she. Maybe doing for him was a second chance, to make up for all the meanness she had shown the others: Poppa, Momma, Cotter, even Hattie.

  She stopped once more to take out the paregoric, run her tongue around the top of the bottle, and replace the cap. Then she went on, fearing now that she would be seen as she scaled the high bank into town, clinging to clumps of grass and to young trees. But she arrived on the main road, breathless and unnoticed, and passed along it to the road that led off to her house. When she arrived, Cotter was sitting on the porch, as he had been since noon, expecting his midday dinner.

  He was starving, he said. Star—ving.

  He expected Ruth Edna to say, Well, he wasn’t helpless in the kitchen. To his surprise, she said she had some good tomatoes, spring onions, and cold corn bread; she’d fix something. When he came along to the kitchen later, she had everything on the table, plus some warmed-up crowder peas. When they had almost finished eating, he said, “That idiot came by while you were gone.”

  “What idiot?”

  “How many idiots you know around here?”

  “Several.”

  “Now, Ruth Edna.”

  “If you mean Jake, how do you know he’s a idiot? How do you know what Jake knows?”

  “It ain’t what he knows. It’s what he don’t know.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “Who, the idiot? How do I know what he wanted. He just looked all around—for you, I guess—and left.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “Poor thing!” Cotter looked significantly at his nearly buttonless shirt. “I’d like to be poor thing a while.”

  “Well, be poor thing a while,” Ruth Edna said, yawning, “but I’m going to take a nap.” She got up and crossed the room to her bed and lay down.

  Cotter had noticed for some minutes that she was about to fall asleep. He got up from the table and went slowly to the door, let it slam shut and went down the breezeway asking himself again, What in the dickens is wrong with Ruth Edna? She was all the time getting so groggy it was as if she wasn’t even in the world. He’d thought for a time maybe she had hold of some whisky. But as Wilroy pointed out, Where would she get it? Maybe it was one of those confounded laxatives she was all the time taking.

  He suddenly stepped up his shuffle and went off hurriedly, having just remembered it was the night they played pitch up to Miss Loma’s store.

  When Ruth Edna woke, it was to someone calling her name, ever so softly and fearfully. For a moment, she could not come to her senses and lay in the near-dark looking about. At the window the oak died brilliantly in the last light, its turned foliage casting a red glow into the room that lay on the far wall like firelight.

  “Miss Ruth Edna.” The voice came again softly.

  She swung her feet quickly, heavily to the floor and stood up. “Little T.?” she said aloud.

  “Yes ’urn.” The voice was still hesitant.

  “There’s nobody else here,” she said, in a full voice. She crossed the room to the window and looked down at him. She could just make out his face in the end of evening light. And it was wet with sweat because he was afraid. The evening itself was cool.

  She saw him relax a little.

  “You going to Senatobia?” she said.

  “Yes ’um. Mr. Wilroy, he say I can catch a ride with him sometime. I told him I had to go up there to see my Auntie. She’s sick.”

  Ruth Edna turned back to the room and crossed it, searched for her pocketbook, and when she found it, took out a dollar and fourteen cents. She creased the dollar around the change until it all was the size of a penny. Then she carried him the money. She unlatched the screen and pushed it open with her hand wide enough to hand him the money. Ever since waking, she had had a disturbed, reluctant feeling, as if she had to see someone she did not want to. But when Little T. reached out and took the money, his hand touched hers slightly, and she felt no desire to recoil. It was not him, then, she did not want to see.

  “When you bring it,” she said, “Thursdays are a good night. Mr. Cotter is uptown to the card game.”

  “Yes ’urn. Evening, Miss Ruth Edna.” He touched a cap he wore.

  “Goodbye, Little T.,” she said.

  As soon as he stepped back, he disappeared into the dusk. She heard him stumble once, right himself, swear softly and go on. She could not help but smile as she closed the window and returned to the room.

  She lit one lamp and took Jake’s shirts from the cedar chest and began to mend them. Th
ere was a smoky smell to them still from all the wood fires over which his momma had washed them in her black iron pot. Her perfect even stitches had long ago turned the collars and made patches that were almost invisible. Ruth Edna stared at the dead woman’s handiwork, thinking of all that lost love and devotion. She wanted to cry, not knowing whether it was for Jake or his momma or herself. She felt devoid of bitterness, felt only a tired emptiness, and knew that the person she had not wanted to see upon arising had been herself.

  Among the shirts some were beyond repair, and she wondered if she couldn’t make Jake a shirt. She put down the finished mending and went outside. Flimsy as gauze, a little blue was left high up in the sky. It would gray soon and turn to dark too. In the garden a brown rabbit sat on its haunches, chewing tender greens, and stared at her. Who would fix the fence? she wondered.

  She went out to the garden, and the rabbit ceased to chew, shuddered and bounded away. She lifted the crumpling gate and went in. Cotter, she noticed, had begun to tie up the tomato plants and had abandoned them to cascade, heavily laden, to the ground. Over the ragged row of greens she stood and looked at where the rabbit had chewed. She bent and began to pick, her fingers seeking expertly the youngest, tenderest leaves. She was going to cook Cotter a good supper tonight; she would cook the greens with a whole chunk of salt pork, the way he liked, instead of just with bacon grease. She’d even open some preserved thing that had been given them, instead of saving everything for holidays the way she had always done. Not until her lap was full of the dark gritty leaves did she look up.

  Now dark had come. Only vague night-white clouds remained in the sky. She felt almost afraid beneath the giant canopy of night. She had a sudden desire to pray, but didn’t know what to pray for. Finally she said, “Help all the sick folks.”

  In the trees a few shrill locusts screamed. In the lettuce crickets cried, and faintly off in the orchard. Nothing was visible but the white of her own hands, and she seemed to be following them as she went back to the house. She lit a lamp in the kitchen and, glad of the quick yellow flame, she lit one in Cotter’s room and in the front room too. She washed the greens and put them on to cook. They would take a long time, and supper would be quite late. She heard footsteps along the breezeway and, carrying the lamp, went toward the dining room. “Cotter, is that you?”