But she thought it was more than that. “Is it about us? Are you worried about us?”
“No,” he said. “Everything’s just the same between us.”
“Hopeless?” she said, and was sorry. She had promised not to talk any more for a while about their getting divorces. He had said she could not understand what it was to have been married for twenty years; how much you had tied up in it—there were children and a house and property and a great span of shared experiences.
But she had not wanted to think practically and had been somewhat disappointed that he did. She wanted to run through town and cry, Yes, we’re cheating. And I love it!
Didn’t he realize how exceptional their love was? She had once read an expression she thought somewhat trite: A happy marriage can never be broken up. Suppose it were true?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I said I wouldn’t talk about us any more for a while.”
He touched her. “I was thinking about chickens.”
“Chickens!” My God, she thought, he had been thinking about chickens while she was trying to solve their whole lives. That was the advantage men had over women—their work. They could always worry about it instead of something they couldn’t do anything about.
“I’m going to have to start raising them, now that cotton’s limited. Folks seem to be doing right well with them, but I hate the dirty bastards.”
“I too,” she said. “We were thinking of rice. But it seems like so much work.”
“Don’t it, though. I wish I could give up farming altogether and raise only cattle. That’s all I really ever have cared about, cattle.”
She was sitting up, leaning against her knees. She wondered if he were looking at her, and at that moment he ran his hand the length of her back. “You’re nice,” he said.
She wanted desperately to turn to him again, but as always, there was not enough time. “I guess we’d better get up,” she said.
“I reckon so.” He slid from the bed and went again into the hall to the bathroom.
She dressed while he was gone. When he returned, she sat on the bed and watched him. It’s so long till next Thursday, she thought, and pressed her hand against her mouth, thinking she was going to cry out. He could not possibly know how much these evenings meant to her. She had discussed with him briefly her problems with Billy but never had told him how unsatisfactory everything really was. If Frank knew how completely she was his, he would begin to lose interest. It was only human nature.
She wondered if he would possibly go home and make love to Eleanora tonight. She wondered how often he did, anyway. She had always wanted to ask him but would not. Several times she had awakened in the night abruptly with a feeling of total loss. Each time she had traced the feeling back to a dream of Frank making love to Eleanora. At those times she had looked at Billy sleeping beside her and been glad that he was there.
Faintly, far off, the church bell began to ring nine o’clock. “We’d better hurry,” she said. “I’ll walk a little way with you.”
“Good,” he said.
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him about the mouth and chin as he put on his coat. They went arm in arm out into the night. One cloud covered the moon and shone luminously, blue; the sky looked thick and dark as midnight. Frances wondered if it were going to rain tomorrow. They followed the uneven wooden walk, crossed the road, and gained the walk on the other side. Ahead were two houses dark as shut-up boxes. They passed them and moved freely down the uninhabited road. Only the Mays’ was beyond. At a bend they stood to separate. He would cut across a field here that would take him home without having to pass back through town. He put his head down to kiss her and raised it suddenly. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Somebody yelling,” he said.
She heard it too. They completed the bend and were facing the Mays’. Against the lighted front windows, they saw a man running across the yard. He cleared the fence as Ruth Edna came onto the porch.
“What——?” Frank said. He started forward.
Frances caught him back. “She’s all right,” she said. “She’s calling him back. Who is it? Could it be Cotter?”
At that moment the feet came toward them on the gravel quicker than it seemed possible for them to have covered that distance. They drew back from the road instinctively. At the last moment Frank stepped forward, but he glimpsed only something white. Then they were listening again to the sound of feet running on gravel, already some distance away.
“What in God’s name? Did you hear it?” Frank said.
“I heard something, but it couldn’t have been a man.”
“It must have been. But it sounded like something half crazy looking for water.”
“What are we going to do?”
“It—he headed uptown. We better go see, unless we ought to go see about Miss Ruth Edna.”
“She seems all right. She went back in the house. How could we explain it if we went to ask her?”
“Let’s go,” he said. They began to run, sometimes together, sometimes with Frances lagging behind. He reached the corner just before her, and when she came up, they stared uptown as the door of her mother’s store opened; the men came tumbling out. All along the way cautious doors were being opened and lights were coming on. Frank said, “You better go home. I’ll go see.” Without another word he went off.
She knew as precisely what to do as if someone had handed her instructions. She did not particularly like herself for knowing. Hurrying home, she wondered which person was herself: this one who knew what to do now, who cared about nothing but herself and Frank, or the guiltless half-person she had been before.
Entering the house, she emptied the ash tray Frank had used, straightened the bed and flung an opened magazine on it. She turned on lights in the hall, in the living room, on the front porch, and looked in on the children before she left the house again.
“What is it?” she called, recognizing Ed Veazey ahead of her on the walk.
“Don’t know,” he called back, and went on almost faster than he could, his chin drawn in, his chest thrust out, comical as someone in a walking race.
The night was alive now with people. All along the way, doors stood open, porches, living rooms, yards were lighted. Frances had never in her life been afraid of the dark night roads, but she was afraid of them brightly lit. It was as if the world had blown up, and everyone were running to survive. There seemed no time to stop, and as she ran, she was aware of the street lights standing out from everything, spots of white-hot color above the road, naked and alone. A nucleus of people had formed in the road ahead, and she ran toward it as if her safety lay there, though actually that was where the unknown, possibly the danger, lay. Around in her mind went the phrase, crazily, Safety in numbers, safety in numbers.
Oh, God, don’t let it be Momma, don’t let it be Billy, don’t let it have anything to do with me at all, she thought.
Beyond, the countryside lay as it should, dark and serene. She thought of the people sleeping undisturbed. She thought of the grave on the nearby slope, with her father in it unaware, the flowers in the cylindrical cold metal vase sunk into the ground over his chest, making bright spots in the dark. On this strange night, she thought, even stranger things could happen; she stopped running, gazed eons away to the very faintly star-pocked sky, and whispered, “Daddy! Daddy, what is it like?”
Then she ran again toward the circle of people that was continually widening as the people stepped backward. It was as if they were going to catch hands and begin the steps of some old country folk dance they had rehearsed.
Beyond their heads she saw her mother and Billy with relief. She felt the crowd’s fear now and heard again the sounds she and Frank had heard in the road. If it were a mad dog, why wasn’t everyone running?
Jostling elbows, she pushed her way forward to the front of the circle and stood, seeing.
A feeling of revulsion went over her and the first faint stirrings
of pity.
Behind her someone said, “I always did expect it.”
She asked herself, Had she? She could only answer herself, No.
Jake, she had thought, would always be the same as she had known him. Perhaps that accounted for the feeling of mislaid trust she felt now as she watched him running about in the middle of the road, in circles of his own, foaming at the mouth. The sounds he made were his sounds of terror, but the crowd thought only of its own.
“Did you see him?” Lulu Veazey said to Frances. Before she could answer, Lulu said, “I never in my life! He came by my house faster than a jack rabbit. And the noise! Worse, even, than he’s making now.”
Somebody else said, “My dog run out after him barking his head off. As soon as I saw good I run out and got him and tied him up. I told my husband at the time, Jake’s as liable to bite that dog as the other way round.”
“You mean like he was really mad?” said a thin trembly voice.
“Shoot,” said the first.
“He was at my house this very afternoon,” said Leila Brown, gaining everyone’s attention. “The kids stopped him going by and commenced to joke with him, and I had him up on the porch and give him a Coke. He could have gone out of his head right there!”
“You might all be dead as doornails right now,” somebody said.
“Ohh,” everybody said.
“Think of all the times he’s been around our kids,” Leila said.
“Our girl children,” said Kate French, with four hanging onto her arm, and big with a fifth child. “And clear out of his head all the time.”
Her sister, Lucille Anderson, said, “You never know. It ain’t safe, I tell you. The menfolks are going to have to do something.”
“They will,” said another woman. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Listen,” somebody said.
The crowd had turned toward one man: old man Hot Evans. It was the first time in two years he had been all the way to town. He stood wagging his billy goat’s beard and said, “Mad. I seen ’urn like this fifteen years ago when I took Sister Annie to the ’sylum. Crazy as bedbugs some of ’em, just standing there banging their heads against stone walls till they bled, not even feeling it.”
Everyone turned back and looked at Jake and could imagine him doing it.
Only Miss Loma and Mary Margaret Sheaffer stepped forward and did not want to believe it. Frances saw Wilroy grab them both back quick, like children not understanding danger and about to cross a street. Frances saw him say something to them in quick sharp words and they looked at each other and began to cry. They’re wishing Jake’s momma was here, Frances thought.
She saw Cotter May standing to one side with a whitened face, pressing his chest, still holding his card hand.
It had gone clear out of her head in the excitement. But of course it had been Jake that left Ruth Edna’s! But if he had gone crazy at her house, why would she have just stood on the porch and called to him? Well, taking into consideration that sometimes Ruth Edna acted crazy herself, wouldn’t she at least have gone to a telephone and called somebody? It was always her phone, the nearest one, that Ruth Edna used. It was strange, but it seemed almost as if Ruth Edna didn’t want anyone to know he had been there.
The crowd had begun to thin slowly, and those who had come the farthest began to go home again, leaving what would happen to Jake to those who had always cared for him.
He had wound down like a top. He had sunk to the ground and fallen over on his side. He was not making the sounds any more, but was wet with long streaks of his own saliva, like a bloodhound or a horse. He half lay, half sat, panting. Slowly he began to look around, as if surprised to find himself back here after all that running.
Tentatively her mother and Mary Margaret and Wilroy began to approach him. She saw little old Miss Hattie McGaha hovering in the background, indicating she would be willing to help if only she had the courage. Some of the men went back to the card game. She saw Cotter give his hand to one of them. He said he was too worn out, and he had a ride home. He got into Freddie Moore’s silver jalopy. She wanted to run after him and cry, “Find out from Ruth Edna!”
But how could she explain how she had known? Why would she have been out on that deserted road at night alone, the children left behind? She never had gone out walking by herself a time in her life. Suppose everybody else believed it? Billy wouldn’t.
Across the cleared place around Jake she saw Frank. In the act of looking away from Jake he saw her.
She had to talk to him. Because it was implicit in the way that people were turning away and walking off, as if it were all decided, that something was going to happen to Jake.
She made her way around the circle and stood close to him and said, “That was Jake coming out of Ruth Edna’s. Something must have happened to him there. We ought to tell somebody.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have come to town? She couldn’t have helped but hear all these cars. And people have been shouting up and down the road. It’s like a circus.”
“I saw Darby Metcalf,” Frances said. “If he heard, she’s bound to have.”
“Jesus,” he said. “There’s nothing we can say.”
“Nothing?” she said.
They were separated by a little group tripping over one another as they got close to Hot, who was walking away telling something: something the old people seemed to know. It was evident in her mother’s sorrowing face. Frances could tell she and Mary Margaret and Wilroy were discussing what to do with Jake tonight—before tomorrow? Tomorrow, she thought, afraid. It was going to sound funny if she and Frank waited until tomorrow to tell. He’s the one ought to do it, she thought. Men could get away with things like that better than a woman. There were a thousand things a man could say: that he was worried about money or crops and had gone off into the dark to think things out; that he had been feeling run-down and had drunk more beer than he had meant to and felt woozy and gone out for air. Or, if worse came to worst, just let people guess what he had been doing. People didn’t think anything about a man; it was practically expected. The others would begin to put together all the Thursday nights and know it was not a sudden, urgent one-time thing, that he was carrying on an honest-to-goodness affair; but who would care besides Eleanora? And she could not leave him. No forty-year-old woman with the amount of money they had and four children was going to leave her husband for no more reason than that. And he could reason with her. He could say all the things that men said: that it had nothing to do with her, that a woman couldn’t understand, it was just something that was in a man; that he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again. She would forgive him. She might even forget. He could even say it was a Negro—one over in the cabins near the Metcalfs’, and that would account for the way he had taken. Eleanora wouldn’t care nearly so much if it was a Negro; she’d know it wasn’t somebody he was in love with. She’d probably think she had failed him in some way, and she would try harder, and in the long run he’d benefit.
Men could never think up verbal deceits. She was going to have to tell him reasons. Wasn’t Brother Patrick ever going away? “Good evening,” she said. He had seen her staring at him.
“Good evening, Frances,” he said. “Isn’t this something?” He shook his head sadly. In the moment that he looked at Jake, Frances looked at Frank. He looked back at her with the same look of straining she had on her face. He’s trying to give me a reason, she thought. She said, “There’s nothing I can say.”
He said, “Why not? Your mother’s a friend of Ruth Edna and Jake too.”
“But what difference does that make?” she said. “She doesn’t know anything’s wrong between me and Billy. I wouldn’t even know where to begin trying to say something.”
“I don’t know anything to say either,” he said. “And maybe all this would’ve happened no matter where he was.”
“Maybe,” she said, bitterly. “It’s easier to think so.”
He turned deliberately away. Furious, she went back around the circle and stared as if she could force him into action. He looked back at her with a look that said plainly, It’s kind of disagreeable, isn’t it, to think of that room back there and that messed-up bed?
Pale, wan as a moon against the dark night, his face stood out; she looked at it and thought all that she had taken for gentleness in him had been in reality wishywashiness. He really was too short for her—or for anybody but that little squat wife of his.
Every time he looked at her he would think she was having an affair with someone else. She hated him for it already.
The night seemed so long it should be dawn. Instead it was only ten fifteen. There was a whole evening still to be got through. Billy was coming home now; she had seen him coming out of the store, putting on his sweater. There was nothing to do but meet him and go home with him. I’ve come back to you, Billy, she thought, even if you didn’t know I’d ever been gone.
Tomorrow’s breakfast coffee would be as bitter as the air between them, boiled because she would have been with the baby, who always made a mess in her pants at the wrong time. And she would not have a Thursday to look forward to, so that it wouldn’t matter. Everything now would matter.
Eleanora had come up to Frank and put her arm through his. Now they were going home, and in passing Eleanora spoke. Frances spoke back, avoiding even looking at Frank. You should have done something, she said silently to his retreating back, her teeth ground together. Oh how lovey-dovey they were! How cute! He did love her, God damn it, even after twenty years. Oh, why doesn’t someone love me? she thought. And why don’t I love anybody? She had so much love to give.
Billy was helping her mother and Mary Margaret to lift Jake up; his legs kept buckling beneath him. Wilroy had gone to get the car. She approached them.
“Can you help us a minute?” her mother said.
She stood and began to cry convulsively, childishly and helplessly, letting her nose run. “I … can’t …” she said finally.
“Oh, baby, it’s all right,” her mother said. She looked at Mary Margaret and said, “It’s time for her to have the curse.”
The Morning and the Evening Page 9