“You see there, you. I been tellin’ you what you were going to end up doing, playing with matches!”
“Are you going to leave that there coal oil lamp alone now!”
And having agreed and been released, all the children ran then to kick up as much dust as they could around the edges of the fire. It was too hot to get any closer. The center was still smoldering, one enormous pile of ashes. And everyone talked about the fire and its start and the death it had caused. No one could remember knowing anyone before who had burned to death, though they all had heard of someone or knew someone who knew someone—and they all had stories to tell. Finally they moved on back to town and then, standing around, indoors or out, they told the stories again.…
That day anybody at all who had any ideas about where Jud might be sent out inquiries or told Wilroy, and he did. They waited two days to no avail. Then on the fourth day after the fire, they held the funeral.
The ladies went into their yards and did their best, but all they could come up with was fewer than a dozen late-blooming roses. Then the men went deep into the country around and cut greenery, just as in a few weeks they would return to cut greenery for Christmas. And once the church was decorated with the cool dark-gleaming pine, and the strong dark sweet-smelling cedar, it made the roses pale by comparison, and at the last moment Miss Loma removed the vase. Later she put the roses on the grave and, of course, they died quickly. All the ladies stood at the back of the church, examining their handiwork, and said, “It is lovely!”
In the two days that Jud was being looked for, a few people had continued to go to the fire. They were not looking for anything. It was obvious there was nothing to find. They simply went and walked around it, and some even walked into it, and they poked. They had sticks or pieces of things from the fire, and they looked into the ashes and settled and unsettled them, poking until whatever it is that makes people poke at fires was answered, and then they would have quit, except that Stump, hunting in the bottomland, found Little T.
Of course, being burned, he was linked to the fire, and it gave them a mystery. People speculated about every conceivable thing, but no one could give much credence to the possibility that he had expected to steal anything from Jake. What would he steal?
On the seventh day after the fire, Little T. was buried. It was decided not to open the casket, which was a good thing since everyone was stuffed inside the church with the windows sealed shut against the cold weather and the stove going full blast.
Then people began going back to the fire site, and some even went to Little T.’s At both places they just stood around and talked. The marshal and his deputies tried to find a trail Little T. might have taken between the two places, but they found nothing.
Christmas came and, busy with that, people began to forget.
In January they had the first heavy snow they had had in ten years. The ground was covered for three days, and in some shady places there were traces of snow even after two weeks. People went nowhere they did not have to.
By March, when they were sticking their noses outdoors and beginning to talk about robins, and from then on, the fire was a topic of conversation only when visitors came to town or people who had been away a long time returned and asked about it. Then they relished telling it, and they told it step by step until they reached the discovery of the dead Negro in the bottomland; then they threw up their hands and said, “Now what can you make of that?”
Where the fire had been, the ashes eventually blew away, and weeds grew up around the edges. It was a wide burned-out blackened place in the ground, too inconveniently located for anyone else ever to build there.
All that had remained of the original house the morning after the fire was the blackened bedsprings and the chimney. The bedsprings stayed until they were rusty, and at last children, having gotten up their nerve, came and carted them away.
Then only the chimney remained. It had been made by hand and was well built of good solid stone. It stood on for a great many years to come, alone against the sky, like a monument to something.
About the Author
Joan Williams (1928–2004) was an acclaimed author of short stories and novels, including The Morning and the Evening, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Wintering, a roman à clef based on her relationship with William Faulkner. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Bard College in upstate New York, Williams was greatly influenced by the legacy of her mother’s rural Mississippi upbringing and set much of her fiction in that state. Her numerous honors included the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1961 by Joan Williams Bowen
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9463-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Morning and the Evening Page 18