Wayne rubbed his index finger and thumb across his eyes and pinched the brow of his nose. He sighed deeply. “I wouldn’t call it nice.”
“It looked pretty nice to me,” Aileen said. “The two of you sitting there with your coffee cups and your shoes off—” She looked at her husband. “Who told him to take off his shoes, anyway? We don’t know how clean—”
“He’s clean. And he is my friend.”
Aileen poked her needle into a pin cushion and set it and the cloth inside the crib. She smoothed her dress. “Wayne, listen to me, honey. I know you’ve had a hard time. I myself cannot even imagine what it must be like to go over there to a war. But I did listen to the radio and read the newspapers up in Marietta. I heard. I know it was rough. But you are back now. Over there is over. Now, we have got to make a life here in Talmaedge County, and that means we live by the way of life in Talmaedge County. I don’t have to tell you what that is. When I came here from Savannah to be with you, I adapted myself to Talmaedge County—but not even in Savannah would we have had a colored man sitting up in the good room. Nowhere, least nowhere I’ve been have I seen that.”
“Maybe you ain’t been nowhere.”
Aileen stood, faced her husband and braced herself with one foot. “I’ve been around enough to know that you’re heading for trouble. We don’t need trouble. We got a boy to raise and baby on the way and that little bit of money you brought from the army won’t last.”
Wayne’s body stiffened and his fist balled and relaxed. “I got plans—”
“Plans? Come spring you’ll be asking Venable for a share to crop. Is that your plan? And let me tell you that Venable won’t be giving a share with anybody he thinks is a—” she leaned toward him and whispered—“a nigger-lover.”
In a quick motion, Wayne drew back his fist and held it as if to strike her. Then he slammed his fist into the open door, rattling the clothes hangers on the coat peg. He drew in a breath deeply. “I’ll be a nigger-lover then. What’s it to you? What’s it to Venable? Bertrand is … Bertrand is a respectable man. He’s a school teacher. He’s a church man. He’s a soldier. He fought Nazis … He.…” Wayne covered his face and breathed heavily into his hands.
Aileen had stepped back, close to Lonnie. Her voice was less shrill. “That might be so, but Wayne, it still don’t make him equal.” She pushed Lonnie in front of her and slowly made her way past Wayne. When she was beside him, she said, “I know you’re right. I’m just saying don’t get into trouble.” Then, she put a hand on Wayne’s shoulder, while keeping the other on Lonnie. “It’ll be all right, honey. I know it will.”
Bertrand visited two weeks later. It was a Friday afternoon, after school. The weather was clear, the sun low in the sky. The air was becoming chilly. The men met by the Henson wood shed, a large plank and tar paper lean-to that sat under an old black walnut tree. The men pushed logs upright to make seats for themselves, rolling the nuts underfoot, peeling off the dry husks. In front of the shed was a large oak log, a makeshift chopping block. To one side of it were piles of the stony shells and peeled husks. Inside, the shed smelled faintly sour of the rows of neatly stacked fire wood, mostly oak. Outside lay a pile of logs to be sawn and split.
Bertrand looked around admiringly. “My daddy always said a man with firewood is a rich man.”
Lonnie agreed. After all, he thought, without firewood people would be cold and couldn’t cook their food. But his father chuckled at the adage. “It’ll take a hell of a lot more than wood to make me rich.” Wayne settled on a log and took a pint of whiskey from inside his Ike jacket. “How about a little fire to go with your wood?” He uncapped the bottle and offered it to Bertrand, who waved it away. “Come on, Bert. A taste—a little toast to the old times, to all the men who didn’t make it back.”
Bertrand took the bottle and hesitantly sipped. He winced. “I’m just not used to it!” They laughed.
“Run up to the house and bring a glass of water for Bertrand,” Wayne said to Lonnie. “Go on now.” Lonnie dashed to the house, hating to miss even a word of the men’s conversation. When he returned with the water, his father was constructing a small teepee of kindling for a camp fire. Lonnie gave the water to Bertrand, and rolled a log into position next to his father. Soon pine smoke frilled around them as the fire blazed. Lonnie smiled, rubbed his hands together and leaned over the fire. Bertrand gulped down half of the water and carefully splashed liquor in what remained. Wayne took back the bottle, clanked it on Bertrand’s glass and both men drank. Then he turned to Lonnie and told him to go away. The boy protested, and went back to the house, but rather than going inside, he circled the yard and sneaked to the rear of the shed. He could not see the men, but could hear them with little effort.
For a moment he watched a cross spider wind its web around a moth. This spider was brown and harmless, unlike the black widows which populated the woodpile. He lay against the lean-to, looking above the tree line at the first stars piercing the sky. There were a crescent moon and two bright stars, one which he knew to be the evening star. The pine smoke wafted to him and he breathed deeply, filling his lungs with its sweetness and the autumn air. He closed his eyes and listened to the quiet voices of the men. His father was speaking and Bertrand was grunting in agreement. They were making a song of it, a little bit of speaking in Wayne’s hushed voice and Bertrand’s resonant grunt. The fire popped and wheezed. Lonnie imagined the world of his father’s words, the cobblestone streets of a town and gunfire all around. A heavy acrid smoke caused him to hack up and spit out black phlegm. His eyes burned from smoke and sweat, and the man next to him shouted for him to pursue. To where, he wasn’t sure. He followed the man in front of him. There was a blast and a rain of glass and stone shards and splinters of wood. He went on, firing at fleeting shadows that whisked around corners or heads that suddenly appeared in windows. The GI in front of him stopped beside a shop’s doorway. The door hung by one hinge, and on a signal, the GI kicked the door down, and the two of them entered, carbines ready with bayonets. In the dim light, mottled by passing clouds of smoke, he could see that it had once been a dress shop. Now the mannequins posed naked, and their glassy stares caused his heart to thump in his ears. He thought of them as once being alive. He moved carefully through the store, aware now that a third GI, a guy from Mississippi, was covering him. He heard a sound coming from the behind a large counter, slowly moved toward it, avoiding the Gaba Girl, posed with an arm raised to her head. Suddenly there was a scrambling, like a large rat clawing on wood, and he turned to fire at it. It was a Jerry, getting to his feet, his hands raised above his head. The Jerry was yelling something, pleadingly, but he couldn’t make it out. It was almost like English, but butchered somehow. He stood just a minute, looking at the Jerry, as much surprised by the sudden surrender as anything. The Jerry was young, and as Wayne’s eyes adjusted he could see that he was probably not yet twenty. His face was sooty with not a single wrinkle, his eyes round with fear. He gasped as he breathed. He saw the boy was beginning to tremble as if he were cold but he, himself, felt nothing. There was another blast. The storefront window shattered. He jabbed the bayonet. He felt it crack through the boy’s solar plexus and slide until it hit something hard inside the body. The boy shook, screamed. He grasped the barrel of the carbine and tried to push it out of himself. Quickly his efforts grew weak and he fell hard on his knees. Still he held the carbine, and looked up. Wayne looked back at him, and he felt nothing for him at that moment. He pulled out the bayonet with a thwack and the young man fell forward, his head landing at Wayne’s feet. Someone fired behind him, and Wayne turned and continued through the building, firing and moving carefully.
The men stopped talking for a while and Lonnie opened his eyes to see more stars in the sky. His mother called to say that supper was ready. No one answered. She called again, and then Bertrand answered, “Coming!” Lonnie sat up just then, wondering what had happened to his father, and then he heard a loud, grievous sigh. It sounded like
an animal. He moved quietly around to the front of the shed. In the flicker of the yellow light from the camp fire, he saw the men embracing, his father on his knees with his head against Bertrand’s shoulder. Bertrand looked at Lonnie. Lonnie couldn’t discern the look. He felt that the colored man was violating a trust, taking advantage of his father’s friendship. At that moment, he hated the man.
His mother called again, and this time Lonnie answered, but no one moved.
Supper was beans, turnips, fried meat, and cornbread, but no one ate. The three of them sat for more than twenty minutes without talking, staring at plates that glowed golden in the kerosene’s lamplight. Occasionally, Aileen shoved food around with her fork, but neither Lonnie nor Wayne pretended to be hungry. Finally, Aileen told Lonnie to go and do his homework. He moved slowly from his chair, but she rose impatiently, took the plates off of the table and scrapped the food back into the pots.
In the everyday room, next to the kitchen, Lonnie sat at the table to figure long division problems. Though the work was not hard to him, he couldn’t concentrate, and so he figured and re-figured the same problem. He remembered the colored man’s eyes, usually big, were slits, and his mouth had drawn down at the edges. The man had looked directly at him when he had come around the corner of the shed, and then he looked away and skyward, as if he were tolerating a bad smell. Meanwhile his father, was grasping at the man’s clothes, and pressing his head against the man’s shoulder as he sobbed. The sobs were deep as if his father lost his breath between each one. He had wanted to push the man away, and yet he couldn’t move to save his father. All he could do was to answer when his mother had called in order to interrupt the colored man from answering.
Now he heard his mother moving about in the kitchen, seemingly making unnecessary noise clanking the spoons in the pots and slamming the door to the ice box. Then she cleared her throat and spoke his father’s name. His father answered softly, and she spoke to him so quietly that Lonnie could not hear. He put down the pencil and looked toward the kitchen. Because his mother had pulled the door shut, he could only see a sliver of lamplight coming from the room. Quietly, he moved, sitting in a square chair between the kitchen door and the stair. As he listened, he looked at the flame in the kerosene lamp on the table next to his arithmetic book. The flame was a steady, little golden spear emanating from its tip the slightest bit of a vapor. It cast the soft shadow of the table onto the floor, and of a china cabinet against the curtain that framed the arch to the parlor. He could see a portrait of his father’s mother in a large oval frame on the wall. The picture, half in shadow, looked only a little like his father. She was plump, rustic, and even in the portrait her eyes appeared to sparkle. He had never known her, or any of his grandparents, all having died before he was born. His mother’s people in Savannah were all cousins, none to whom she was close. His father’s people in Talmaedge seemed to have all died out or moved West to Kansas and Nebraska, except for a cousin who had married well, to a woman in the county establishment. Otherwise, his had been a family without much land, poor laborers on other white men’s farms, serving as overseers or tradesmen until the Civil War, when they sought their fortune as infantrymen.
“What is it? Tell me, please.” He heard his mother say. “You told him, but you can’t tell me? I’m your wife, Wayne. I love you no matter what.” He heard his father gasp and shift in his chair. Then in a cracking voice, his father said, “I killed a boy. He was giving up. I killed that boy, no older than … my own boy.”
Lonnie felt cold and his stomach knotted as he imagined the boy’s face again, the sooty face coming out of the shadows, the big eyes and slack mouth. “But you didn’t mean to do it,” Aileen said. “Whatever you did. It was wartime. You did what you had to. It was your job. And don’t think for a moment that he wouldn’t have done it to you.”
“I don’t think he would have.”
“Never mind that. It wasn’t your fault.” He heard the rustle of their clothes and something dropped from the table. “I just thank God it wasn’t the other way around. What would I do without you?” His mother was crying now and Lonnie, too, felt his nose close up. “God. Thank God for His mercy.”
He heard his father stand, and he moved to the edge of his seat, preparing to return to his homework. “Yes,” Wayne said. “God has had mercy. For some reason—so, understand this, Aileen, I’ve got to do something to make this right. Understand it’s not the shooting of a German soldier. I don’t know how many German soldiers I might have killed, but it is that one boy. That is the one God made me see and I killed him, so it must be made right.”
“But how can you make it right?” His mother’s voice was harder now. “What can you do?”
“Something, goddamnit. Something to make up for it.”
“But what? You don’t know his family. You don’t speak their language. No way in the world to find them. Best thing is just to let it go. Go on with our lives here. You get some of that GI Bill money they’re talking about and learn a trade or something. We don’t have to stay here. We can go up to Atlanta or back to Savannah. We got a chance in this world, Wayne. Don’t let something like this drag you down, honey.”
Lonnie stood and sniffled. The prospect of living in Savannah, on the big, oily smelling river was exciting to him.
“I don’t know. Do you think that will be enough?”
“Yes. Yes, yes. It’ll be enough. It’s not like you planned to kill that boy. You didn’t start the war. They did. They should be making it up to us.” She was quiet for a minute and Lonnie realized his parents were kissing. “Thank God, you are alive. Thank God, we can go on.”
The coming weeks brought excited joy to the household as Wayne scoured the advertisements in the Atlanta newspapers for a trade school. He invited Bertrand into the house to help him look. Aileen was not happy to see the colored man sitting in the lamp light at the table in the everyday room. She told Wayne that she didn’t know which was worse, having a colored man in the house in the daytime or in the nighttime, as people driving by would see his car parked in the yard. But she eventually acquiesced. She made little sense out of the forms, so it was good to have the school teacher there, she said.
Among the notices for carpentry, plumbing and crop dusting schools was one for agricultural techniques. Wayne tore this one from the page and carried it in his pocket for a day, until Bertrand advised that in order to put such skills to good use, he would have to buy a farm, not just a few acres, and certainly nothing akin to Thousand Acres, Mr. Venable’s plantation, or Woodbine, Mr. Jack’s plantation, but at least a hundred acres. Otherwise, the only work he would get would be for Venable or Jacks or someone like them. Together, they settled on a school for rural electrification. That job would keep him in the country, possibly even in Talmaedge County, since most homes in Talmaedge had no electricity. “It’ll be good to bring power to the people,” Bertrand said. Bertrand helped Wayne compose a letter of interest, and when the application for the school came, he helped Wayne to fill it out. The plan was to move to Atlanta for at least little while. The “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act,” the GI Bill, would pay living expenses for the family and for Wayne to study at the trade school, and Aileen said that she could find a job in one of the textile mills. The prospect of the move filled the house with excitement. Lonnie asked incessantly of his mother about the big city, but she had little to tell him. She had worked at the airplane plant in Marietta, a town fifteen miles from the city. Except for the air force base, it was nearly as rural as Bethany. Marietta did have a nice little square, a bit bigger than Bethany’s, and it had a movie palace. She had enjoyed watching the movies on her days off.
On the evening that Wayne finished the application, he poured a bourbon and water for Bertrand and himself and opened a RC Cola for Lonnie. They sat in the everyday room, around the table and Wayne allowed Lonnie to pick up the neatly addressed envelope and examine it in the lamp light. The envelope, yellow from age, had a stamp depicting the Marine
s raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. It amazed Lonnie that in that envelope was the promise of their future.
“It’s as good as done,” Bertrand assured Wayne. “They’ll take you, no doubt—they have to according to Uncle Sam. And then you will be set. You can go anywhere in the world with that skill, anywhere where they need electricity. And you will be getting good pay and helping people all at the same time.”
Wayne admitted that he was nervous about it, but Bertrand waved him off. “Well, I am not an educated man like you are,” Wayne said.
“Where do you think I started from?” Bertrand asked. “A lot of it’s just common sense and good luck. This young squire,” he nodded to Lonnie, “he’ll have the luck now. Once you get up a bit, see. Once your daddy gets going a bit, then it’s so much easier for the children to get a leg up in life. That’s why I came back to Talmaedge—well, because of my mother—but also to help the poor children whose parents don’t have anybody to help them. I figure I can teach them a little something, at least what I learned.”
Wayne sipped from his glass and sighed. “This is a modern age, now, Bertrand. You ought to be teaching all the children, not just the colored ones.”
“That’s good of you to say,” Bertrand said slowly and looked down.
“How would you like that,” Wayne said to Lonnie, “to have Mr. Bertrand as your teacher?”
Lonnie gasped. His face burned. “Maybe,” he said softly, but the idea of the round-faced colored man as his teacher dumbfounded him. The other children would tease him if they knew a colored man taught him, and if they found out that this teacher was his father’s friend, the teasing would doubtlessly turn to bullying. But then he thought it all akin to a fairytale, something impossible, a fable for his father’s imagination.
The Vain Conversation Page 5