“Over …?”
“You goddamn hillbillies got a radio? The war’s been over—three, four weeks. Your daddy probably half way home by now. But listen, I’m going to make it up to you about this dog, you hear? I’m going to bring you some money.”
Lonnie didn’t care about money, but he nodded in agreement. The man got into the car and drove away, leaving the boy standing beside the road.
Aunty didn’t believe the war had ended and when the boy insisted on the veracity of the stranger, she moved a chair to the stoop to await the arrival of the mailman. Toby’s corpse still lay in the ditch and the faint smell of the kill came to them in whiffs. The old woman cursed the stranger for not following her instructions, and, anticipating a rank smell, instructed the boy to pull the dog out of the ditch and further into the woods across the road from the house.
The dog was not heavy and the corpse slid along easily on the leaf mulch. The boy gripped the dog’s front paws, and let the claws dig into his palms, but he could not look at the dog. When he was out of sight of the house, he let go, started to walk away, but turned back. His stomach tightened and he opened his mouth to bellow, but only a crackle came out of his throat. Then he thought he must bury the dog and looked around for something to dig with. Finding nothing, he raked leaves over the body with his hands, until Toby was buried under a knee-deep mound of leaves and twigs. He had no sooner finished, when he heard the approach of a car, and ran to the road to see the mailman’s car, already stopped at the mailbox and Aunty speaking to the man. By the time, he got across the road the car was pulling away. He tried to read Aunty’s face, but her stern look gave him no clue.
“Is it true?” he whispered.
She looked down at him, and without a sign of pleasure in the news, said, “Yes.”
Lonnie sighed. It was a long sigh that came up from behind his navel. “Aunty, it is over?”
“Yes, it is over.” Slowly, she started back to the house. “Don’t mean your daddy will be back, though. Don’t mean nothing until you see him in the front door. Many a men go off and you don’t hear from them ever again. Don’t know if they’re dead or alive.”
“He’ll be back.”
The old woman looked at the boy and grunted. “Go wash your hands.”
Three days passed and the boy’s anticipation grew. He busied himself: straightened the parlor, dusted his parent’s room, swept the front stoop, and fiddled around in the kitchen until the old woman threw him out. Then three more days passed. His eagerness failing and growing into anxiety such that he flagged down the mailman to ask again if the war had indeed ended. Securing the answer, he asked if soldiers had returned. The man knew of some soldiers who had returned, but knew nothing of Wayne.
Then one afternoon, when the heavy humidity and heat forced them to find shade in the back yard, Lonnie thought he heard a car pull off the road and into the driveway on the other side of the house. Lethargy held him fast to the grass on which he lay. He raised his head and saw the old woman, slumped down in her chair, her head lolling across her shoulder. A car door slammed. Lonnie sat up. He soon realized someone was in the yard, and he walked around to the front of the house. He saw a man with his back to him, bent over talking to the driver of the car. A duffel bag sat beside the man’s leg. He wore a uniform. He stood, still with his back to Lonnie, and the boy, knowing the man his father, started walking toward him, saying nothing, his arms open, tears in his eyes and a smile so wide it cracked the skin on his lips. He reached the man just as the man turned. “Daddy,” he said softly, and embraced his father.
THREE
The next day passed quietly as Wayne settled into his home. Lonnie helped him unpack the duffel bag, which contained an Eisenhower jacket, a few khaki shirts and pants, underwear, dress shoes, a bottle of French perfume for Aileen, and a Colt M1911 service pistol. The gun was angular and sleek, unlike the bulky revolvers the boy had seen in Western movies. “Is it a spy’s gun?” he asked. His father laughed and allowed him to hold it. It was heavy, Lonnie thought. Then Wayne put the gun into the bureau drawer and locked it. Later that day, they walked around the place—to the dilapidated pig pen, the chicken coop with its roof fallen in, the fallow garden. At first the boy peppered his father with questions about the war, but the man’s responses were aphoristic, curt, or silent altogether, so the boy settled on his presence. They buried Toby. The buzzards had picked him down to skin and bones. Wayne dug the grave. They pushed the skeleton into it with their feet and covered it.
“He was too good to lay out for buzzards,” Wayne said.
“Daddy, I tried,” the boy said, looking up at his father’s face. The man seemed about to cry. After a moment, he put his hand on Lonnie’s head and rested it there.
The old woman greeted Wayne as if he had only run into town and back. She cooked for him, and the three ate in silence. Now and again Aunty would remark, “I didn’t think you’d be coming back. Thought sure they’d killed you.”
Three days after he had returned, a tall, slender woman, Mrs. Crookshank, came to the door with a large purse and a box camera in hand. She was known as the widowed proprietress of Maribelle’s Diner, but that day she came as a reporter for the Talmaedge Tattler which was publishing a special article on the men coming home from the war.
“May I come in?” Mrs. Crookshank pulled open the screen door before Wayne could answer, and he led her to the parlor, a neatly furnished, dark room just off of the house’s common room. The woman seated herself at one end of the sofa, took a school composition notebook and pen out of her purse, and snapped it shut. “Now,” she said, adjusting her cat-eyed glasses, “Give me your full name and the names of your parents.”
Wayne told her.
“And your wife is?”
“Aileen,” he said.
“And this young man?” she turned and smiled at Lonnie who was standing in the doorway. “I take it, he is your boy.”
Wayne nodded.
“Are you happy to have your daddy back?” the woman asked Lonnie. Despite the woman’s officious manner, Lonnie thought the question silly, and he stared at her. “But of course you are. May I say, ‘You betcha?’”
“Uh?”
“In the article, I’ll say you said, ‘You betcha.’”
“Okay.”
Mrs. Crookshank winked at Lonnie and turned to his father. “Now, Mr. Henson, what do you want to tell the good people of Talmaedge County about your homecoming?”
Wayne moved restlessly in his chair, pushing himself into the cushions. He rubbed his hands together as if warming them, then folded his arms across his chest and tucked his hands into his arm pits. “Well—” he started and cleared his throat. “Well, I am glad to be back home. I just got back. It’s good to be back.” He stopped speaking and his face reddened.
Lonnie thought that his father would cry and he fidgeted, first wanting to go to him, and then afraid to embarrass the man. “We’re going to raise pigs again!” the boy blurted. “Now that Daddy is back, we’re going to raise pigs and plant a big garden. And Daddy said we might get some chickens and a cow, too.”
“Oh, that’s lovely,” Mrs. Crookshank said. “Our farms have been so lacking during this war. Now that our men are back, we can—”
“There’s a lot of work to do,” Wayne said. “And this time, now—now things are going to be different than before the war. I am going to have some things I always wanted. Ain’t fixin’ to be working for nobody else but me from now on.”
“You want to go into business—”
“I’m tired of this sharecropping. It ain’t worth it for a poor man. Just work yourself to death for the likes of—and the war, too—when you have been there and you come back here, you don’t want things to be the same. You understand, lady? Things ain’t the same.”
Mrs. Crookshank busied herself taking notes. No longer smiling, she avoided eye contact with Wayne. Then, almost absently, she said, “I suppose you saw a lot of things over there, Mr. Henson.
A lot of ugly things.”
Wayne looked not at her but at his hands in his lap, then at Lonnie. “Not so much what I saw, as what I did.”
There was a moment of stillness and then Mrs. Crookshank snapped open her purse, put the pen and notebook away, and picked up the camera. “I am sure the readers would be interested in a picture, Mr. Henson. Perhaps we can get you and your son … and the lady of the house?”
“She’s at work,” Lonnie said.
“Oh, what a shame. That would be such a nice picture, too. Tell you what, when your momma is not working, maybe one Saturday you all come on by Maribelle’s Diner and have a meal on the house. We’d just love to do something for our service men and their families. Just love to.”
Two weeks more passed before the boy’s mother came home. Just as her husband had done, she arrived in the afternoon, having taken the noon train from Atlanta and a hired car from the station. Lonnie saw her from the corner of the house and started to run toward her as she dragged her suitcases across the lawn. But then he saw his father, coming from the front door, walking in hurried strides. She let go of the suitcases and stood with her arms beside her. Just before he reached her, she covered her face, and, as he embraced her, she fell into him. Lonnie heard her sob loudly and then breathlessly call out his father’s name. He watched them embrace for such a long time that he began to perspire from standing in the sun. Then, thinking the reunion had gone on long enough, he joined them. Still in his father’s embrace, his mother put her hand around the back of his neck and drew his face against her warm body. “Daddy’s home,” she said to him, and began to sob again.
Aunty cooked a big, plain supper that night. She made cornbread and sweet tea. The family sat around the table, quiet at first. Slowly they began to tell stories. Lonnie told of Toby’s death. His mother told about the airplane factory and the women she had met there. She said that after she learned that the war was over, she decided to work as long as she could before the returning men replaced her. She had not thought to hurry home, thinking that Wayne would not arrive for many months. Wayne talked mostly about his trip home. He said it had slipped his mind until he had seen Aileen, but he had stopped over in New York City. The big city had made him nervous. Even with a map, he never knew which way to go on the streets. Luckily, he befriended a colored man, a GI from Detroit, and his friend had helped him see the sights. Lonnie was excited that his father had seen New York City and asked about the landmarks, the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Yes, his father told him, he had seen those things, but he hadn’t gone up in them. He’d wanted to save what money he had. And besides, it wasn’t much fun to see those things without his family.
With army pay and Aileen’s savings, the family had a bit of money for once. They repaired the pig pen and the coop, bought a shoat and a few hens, and planted a fall garden. They also purchased a second-hand car, a 1939 Ford Tudor Deluxe. It was a fancy car, more than what they needed, Aileen argued, but Wayne liked the car. It ran eighty-five horsepower on a V-8 engine and the upholstery was like new. It had been driven by a judge from Greene County and his widow was willing to let it go for just two hundred dollars. When she found out that Wayne was a veteran, she knocked twenty dollars off of the price.
Fall set in. Yellow sweet gum, russet oaks and the occasional flame-red maple dressed the woods. The days shortened considerably. Still the Indian summer persisted. One day, when the family was sitting to supper, the kitchen door open to the warm evening, Aileen announced, “I have a little surprise. A baby sister or brother for you, Lonnie.” She patted Lonnie on the head. He took comfort in her soft fingers in his hair, and longed for her caress the moment she took it away. The idea of a baby was abstract to him, distant, and he fidgeted, resisted the impulse to crawl into his mother’s lap.
“What are you so proud of, suh?” Aunty abruptly turned to Wayne. “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary. You reckon a baby’s got to eat?”
Wayne looked at Aileen, amusement on his face. “I reckon. I reckon we’d feed the little feller.”
Aunty chewed quietly for a while and spat gristle into her palm. “Then I reckon it’s time to make my ’nouncement. Been thinking this a while, and now just as good a time as any.
“I just come to look after the boy while you were away. So now, now I will go on back to Savannah where I belong.”
“But you belong here, Aunty Grace,” Aileen argued. “You can stay as long as you want.”
“Don’t matter what I want. Matters what the Lord wants. Lord says it time for me to go and leave you to your family. Lord blessed you real good, Aileen. You got your husband back. You got a boy and a baby on the way.” She laughed dryly and coughed. “You ain’t got no use for an old woman like me. My day gone, anyway. This is a new day, now.”
“Now, Aunty, this is just as much your day as anybody’s—”
“Aileen, use your common sense,” Aunty said. “You are home. Wayne is home. Now it is time for me to go back home. Savannah is my home. Isn’t that right, Wayne?”
Wayne chewed quietly. The supper was cabbage and beef and a side of sliced ripe tomatoes, the season’s last. “We sure appreciated having you,” Wayne said at last, “and you are welcomed any time.”
The next Saturday morning, Aunty presented herself at the front of the house wearing a black dress, a black shawl, and a black brimmed hat made of straw. She had two suit cases. Aileen made her a box lunch, and without much fanfare, Wayne drove her and the family to the train depot. Shortly after noon, she boarded the train with the help of a colored porter. Aileen waved goodbye furiously, but Aunty only nodded curtly through the train window.
Back in the car, Aileen patted at her tears with a handkerchief. “I hate to see her go. She’s the last of my family.” In fact, Alieen had other family, various cousins whom she rarely saw.
Wayne said nothing and Lonnie felt sad only because his mother was sad. He thought he might miss Aunty. On the other hand, just seeing her packed and standing by the car seemed to have lifted a darkness from the house.
“But she had to go,” Wayne broke the quiet inside the car with a soft declaration. “There was just too much happiness in our house for her.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Aileen asked.
“We are happy. We are going to have a baby. We are going to do all right, and well—I hate to say it, Aileen, but Grace is hung up in the past. Whatever you do, you mustn’t let something hang you up. That old woman has been stuck for the past seventy-five years. Either it’s her daddy in the War Between the States or her beau in the Indian War.” He paused and slowed the car. “You’ve got to move on. That’s what we’re doing. We are moving on.”
Lonnie leaned over the seat back, pondering his father’s words. He didn’t understand them, but was afraid to ask their meaning. His mother said nothing, and then Wayne changed the tone brightly, patting Aileen on the hand, “I know! That lady—Mrs. Crookshank—promised us a meal.” Wayne looked over the seat back at Lonnie for confirmation. “Why don’t we go by her place and have a fancy lunch?”
Maribelle’s Diner was located on the main street, just down from the bank, the courthouse, the jail, the general store and the Baptist and Methodist churches that formed the town square. The train depot was located next to the Feed and Seed, down the hill from the square and next to the river.
Half of Maribelle’s dozen or so tables were taken. The family sat at one of three booths at the front of the restaurant, next to the windows that looked out onto Main Street. Floral curtains framed the windows. At the back of the restaurant, serviced by a separate entrance and separated from the larger dining room by a railing, was a dining room with one large table. “When did Maribelle’s start serving colored?” Aileen wondered aloud. “I know this isn’t the nicest place, but I didn’t think they served colored here.”
Wayne took menus from between the salt and pepper shakers and handed one to his wife. “Colored got to eat too.”
“But they don’t have to eat here,” his wife whispered, and then noted that Maribelle was known for its cakes.
“They won’t bother you, sitting in the back.”
“You have to look at them.”
Wayne put down the menu sheet and looked out of the window. “No you don’t.”
A man in a fedora entered. Lonnie looked up and dropped his fork. It was the man who had run over Toby. “Leave your fork on the table,” his mother chastised. The man passed by their table, not waiting to be seated. Lonnie looked down, hoping the man would not recognize him. Then the waitress came to take their order.
“Is the owner here?” Wayne asked. “Mrs. Crookshank.” The waitress said yes, but that she was busy. “I’m a veteran. She said I should stop in for a free meal.”
“I’ll tell her,” the waitress said with a nod, and stood with her pencil and pad ready. They ordered fried chicken. Then Lonnie’s attention turned again to the man who had killed Toby. He sat at a table in the middle of the room and rested one foot on the railing of the chair next to him. He had already been served a Coca-Cola and was smoking a cigarette. The fedora lay on the table in front of him.
Lonnie tapped his mother on the elbow. “That’s the man,” he said and pointed.
“Quit your pointing,” Aileen said. “I taught you better.”
“What man?” Wayne asked.
Lonnie pointed again. “The man that killed Toby.”
“Lord,” his mother said and looked about nervously. “Oh, Lord.”
“He said he was going to give me some money.”
“That figures,” Wayne said with a sigh. The man was Vernon Venable, the owner of Thousand Acres, the plantation that Wayne had share cropped for. “Son,” he said a little louder than he needed for Lonnie to hear. “You can’t depend on everything you hear from people. Not everybody tells the truth, and some people will say anything to get what they want—”
“Hush up,” Aileen whispered. She put her hand on top of Wayne’s.
The Vain Conversation Page 3