The Vain Conversation
Page 8
“Mistreated,” the singer growled.
“Mistreated.”
“Sho’ nough, hmmmm, cheated.”
“Cheated.”
“Somebody always tryin’ to put me down, but nobody going to keep me from my crown.”
The singing continued as the boy slipped along the side of the church, hoping not to be seen from the windows by sliding under them. As he got near the back of the building, he saw an open door with steps leading down from it. He slid under the steps, and poked his head up to the level of the threshold of the door. From there he could see the inside of the church. In front of the altar stood Bertrand. He had been the one who was singing. Then there was a hum and a growl and shout from the rostrum as the preacher came forward and slapped the podium with his hand. Bertrand answered the slap with a stomp of his foot. The preacher slapped again, and Bertrand stomped with the other foot. There was clapping and shouting of “Hallelujah” and “Praise Be to God” from the congregation.
“I don’t know,” the preacher sang out. “I don’t know.”
Bertrand spun around in a circle, stomping the wooden floor so hard that dust sprang up around his feet. He wore oxfords, nicely polished, but now speckled with the dust. He had discarded his jacket, but still wore a tie tightly at the collar of his white shirt. The shirt was becoming stained with rings of sweat under the arms pits and around the collar.
“I don’t know,” the preacher said again.
Other people, men and women, old and young, joined Bertrand in the dance, but the boy only looked at Bertrand. At first it seemed a spectacle, something that embarrassed him. He thought that Bertrand would be embarrassed for him to know it. Dancing in church—that’s what niggers do. That’s the way niggers pervert the worship of the Lord, by dancing around like a bunch of monkeys. But as the boy watched, as the rhythm moved through the floorboards, through the clapboard, he began to feel an impulse to move with it. It was not quite the beat of his heart, not quite the pulse of his breath, but a rhythm that made his heart skip a beat and his breath catch.
Bertrand’s face was swollen in the heat and sweaty, eyes closed and mouth set in the slightest, most pacific smile the boy had ever seen. He had seen pictures of Jesus in his mother’s bible, and Jesus was supposed to have the holiest of all faces, but never had he seen a face that called to him with its openness, its serenity. Suddenly he saw that it was not just a face, but many faces. First it was his father’s face—two men couldn’t have looked more different, and yet, there was Wayne’s face inside of Bertrand’s. Then there was his mother’s face, and the old woman’s face. There were many familiar faces, people from around Talmaedge, colored and white, and then stranger faces—lean, hungry faces—faces with pained eyes, though Bertrand’s eyes remained closed, and faces with laughing mouths, though Bertrand’s mouth remained set in the smile. Then the face became the shapes of things he knew and loved from the forest—the face of the dogwood tree, the pignut hickory, the tulip poplar; the face of the yellow jacket, the damsel fly, the daddy long legs; the face the white-tailed deer, the spotted skunk, the woodland vole; the face of the whippoorwill, the barn owl, the turkey vulture.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Lonnie wanted to dance with Bertrand for he thought that Bertrand was no longer dancing on Earth, but that his soul had moved some place beyond, some place deep in the woods. He felt himself kick at the dirt beneath the steps, and he felt shivers run up through his body. He crawled from under of the stairs, still feeling the vibration from the church, only now it came through the ground. He found himself making a little stompon the ground.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
He stopped himself. This was wrong, he told himself. It was something colored people did and white people didn’t. He stomped again on the ground, but this time, he turned looking for a way to run. Bertrand was too proud, his mother had said. She had said to stay away. Now the boy felt like crying. His mother had said it was the way of nature. The Bible said so.
“I don’t know what you come here for; I come to praise the Lord,” the preacher said. “For only through the Lord can there be redemption. Only through death in this old life, and rebirth into a new life can you be saved. You must be born again through Jesus Christ, but to be born again, you must first die!” A rousing shout came from the congregation and once again, Lonnie moved close to the door and looked in. At first he didn’t see Bertrand, and then he realized that Bertrand was nearly standing on top of him. He was no longer dancing, but swaying and rocking in place and raising on toes. His body radiated heat and he smelled of hot cologne. Sweat dripped onto the dusty floor next to his feet.
“Too many people want to go to heaven,” the preacher said, his voice settling into a speaking rhythm, “but they don’t want to die. But it can’t be that way.”
“Hallelujah!” Bertrand shouted and clapped so loudly it startled Lonnie.
“If you want the reward,” the preacher continued. “You got to pay the price.”
“Hallelujah!”
“You can’t go on doing the things of this world and say you saved. No.”
“Hallelujah!” Bertrand’s rocking increased in frequency.
“For there is a great day a’comin’!”
“Praise be to God!”
“A great day in the morning! A great day in the night! A great reckoning day where all accounts will be settled with the only bill collector that matters—and if your balance isn’t paid in full, then your immortal soul—said God Almighty—will be lost in the depths of eternal hell—and that is the one death from which there can be no rebirth! There is no redemption from hell!”
First Bertrand and then the entire congregation exploded into a fury of shouting, singing, and dancing. It was so sudden that Lonnie was startled once again and he tried to back away from the door. Then, he caught glimpse of a woman, who in all the crowded frenzy, sat quiet and straight in her flowered dress. She seemed to him to be in a different place than all the others, in a place that was as peaceful as sitting by the quiet waters of a lake. She turned and he saw that she saw him. She was not peaceful, but cut him with such a look of hatred that he felt a pain shoot through him.
“I don’t know,” the preacher shouted above the clapping and foot stomping.
The boy saw the way to the marsh and ran.
SEVEN
He said nothing of the visit to the church to Aileen, not only because she would have disapproved, but also because he felt she could not explain to him what it was he had seen. From the distance it was comedic, a kind of coon show like Amos and Andy from the radio, but up close it was something mysterious, and he had nothing to compare it to except vague memories of even vaguer dreams. Wonderful things happened in the dreams—travel to distant places, heroic adventures—things that excited him long after waking, but that he could not clearly recall. He wanted to go again and dance with Bertrand.
Later in the week, Maribelle Crookshank visited his mother again. This time she came into the house, sitting on the sofa as she had done when she first visited his father. She seemed nervous, fidgety as she positioned and repositioned herself on the sofa. “I’ve got something you should hear,” she announced after the initial pleasantries. “But it is grown ups’ business.” She cast her eyes at Lonnie, standing in the doorway, and his mother asked him to go and finish his chores. He was slow to move, but went to the back of the house. He could hear Crookshank’s nasally whine, but could not distinguish her words, and when she was gone, he returned to see what the matter was.
Aileen’s face did not relay Crookshank’s excitement, and when the boy asked, she said nothing was the matter. She seemed contemplative, so much so that she sat at the table in the common room and rested her face in her hands. “It’s really nothing that needs to concern us.” She reached out and took his hand. “Just you mind me and keep your distance from that Bertrand. That’s all.”
“Did something happen to Bertrand?”
“Jimmy Lee?”
“Yes. He attacked Mr. Venable.”
“He killed him?” The boy imagined the tall angular man who had stood in the road in front of the house with his father’s shotgun.
“That devil? He’s too wicked to be killed. No. Stabbed him, according to Maribelle Crookshank, but you can’t believe a thing that gossip says. She’s about the most irksome woman I know. And from a distance, I thought I would like her.”
“He stabbed him?”
Aileen chuckled. “According to that old hen, he stabbed him in the buttocks. And that about suits him right. It’s nothing for us to worry about, and Mrs. Crookshank just told me because of the crib, I reckon. Anyhow, let it be a lesson to us all, just to keep our distance.”
The next day was Friday, and the boy expected Bertrand on Saturday. He decided to get ahead on the garden work. They were already late putting in the tomatoes, and he guessed that they just might not have any, since Bertrand hadn’t been able to find any slips. It was too late to grow them from seed and his mother said she didn’t have any money to buy seeds anyway. He thought he’d go over to the Feed and Seed by himself and ask Venable for some on credit. It was a long walk, close to eight miles, and he knew that his mother wouldn’t allow them to be indebted to Venable. Then, he remembered that the summer before, Venable had had a tomato patch at the edge of a cornfield just up from the river. He thought that there would probably be a few volunteers growing around if he could find them. The place was not far—though farther than his mother would let him go—and he knew the path. It was the path that Wayne had taken many times when he worked for Venable, leading the mule with the boy astride.
The woods were becoming thick; the weather had turned hot, and the leaves had filled in the trees and undergrowth, but were still clean and bright. The path was plain. The first part of the path followed the nameless little creek to a marshy spot, where cardinal flowers and Joe-pye weed were growing, and cut up to the top of the ridge. On the ridge, the path was a little harder to follow, but he knew the way because it would take him toward the cut-off to Christmas Hill where the blackberries were. From there, the way to Venable’s was in the opposite direction. He approached the field, not thinking about too much, just watching the way the woods looked, and smelling everything—the rich dampness of decaying leaves. It smelled better than any kind of tobacco or tea or coffee. Then he heard a little scream, and he froze in his tracks like a deer. He had the same feeling of danger as when he had dreamed about his dead sister. In the dreams he could never see her face, only the sprite form of a little girl.
He stepped off the path. The leaves crackled under his feet like cymbals. He tiptoed, pushing the leaves out of the way with his toes so that he touched only the soft, spongy leaf-mold. The scream came again, a high-pitched little yelp, he would have thought it was a dog, but it was a girl—and then a heavy voice that was a man. The voices sounded like they were coming from right over the ridge, and he had a feeling he was close. Suddenly, he moved aside a bush and he was right on top of them.
That the man and the girl were wrestling was his first thought, but he had never seen a man and a girl wrestle. She was down on all fours, her face was almost on the ground and the man was behind her, riding on her, with his pants below his buttocks and a ribbon of bandages untangling from his thighs. The boy knew they weren’t wrestling, and even though he was innocent about all the configurations and complications of human lust, he figured they were fornicating. He had never before witnessed the act, but he had heard enough to know it when he saw it.
The man was Venable. But who the girl was would be a mystery to him for many years, and it would give him a little shock when he learned it was Jewel Mae Lee, Jimmy Lee’s wife. By that time he would have lost any modicum of naïveté, but still the recognition would make him doubt that chance played a role in the tryst, or in his witnessing of it. It would occur to him that he existed in a realm of complete ignorance, an inferior level of human sophistication, one that was as malleable as tin to those who were his social betters. These betters, Venable being foremost, played games that dented and bent the pathetic lives of average people, and then left them to rust away.
All of this worry would come much later. At that moment, just the sight of the injured white ass humping the brown girl startled the boy so much that he took a step back and gave himself away.
Jewel Mae saw him first. She was faced away from him, but she turned her head back, her mouth opened and her eyes closed at first. Just at that time, the boy crunched the leaves, and she opened her eyes. She let out another little scream, not too different from the others, and Venable said, “Hold up, gal,” and pulled her back into him. His voice was straining. “Hold up, gal.” She was trying to pull away from him. And then, he saw the boy, too, and growled at him. Lonnie ran as fast as he could.
He had caught his breath by the time he got to the tomato patch, and then the excitement of the morning collapsed: The tomato patch had been newly plowed and planted with new slips. The boy couldn’t find any volunteer slips. Venable probably had three or four hundred vines, which meant he was going to sell some to the cannery this year. The boy thought about how much Venable had, and how he and his mother had nothing—not even one tomato slip—and he was tempted to take a few of the plants. Venable wouldn’t miss them. Even if he took a dozen, the boy thought, Venable wouldn’t know they were missing and that would be plenty for him and his mother—enough to eat all summer, and to can, and to have green tomatoes for frying with eggs and making chow-chow.
But he had been told time after time, by his mother, by Wayne, by Bertrand, too, that a good man doesn’t steal. Even if he’s hungry, he doesn’t steal. But to tell a hungry man not to steal, couldn’t be right, the boy thought. That’s what the rich folks who have plenty to eat would say to the poor man, but they didn’t mind cheating and stealing from the poor. It didn’t matter much whether the poor were colored or white, the rich stole from them if they wanted. Wayne had cropped a bit for Venable, and though Wayne had said little about it, the boy’s mother had on many occasions called Venable a cheat. But they weren’t supposed to mention that outside of the family, she said.
The blackberries may have been on Venable’s property or they could have been on the lumber company’s, the boy didn’t know. Still, it wasn’t stealing to pick wild fruit whether you were a human or a raccoon. So on the way back from getting no tomato slips, the boy took the cut-off up to Christmas Hill and looked to see if the blackberries were ripe. They were further along than he thought they would be. He stood looking at the great tangle of briars, taller than he, that ran down the slope of the hill. The breeze swayed the red tipped briars and cast sun and shadow about as if it were the surface of a lake. It was no wonder people said that Christmas Hill was haunted with the ghosts of Indians, pioneers, and slaves—restless, though they were, they all came here for the berries. Already most of the berries were plump and red, which is the way they turn just before they ripened, but many were already ripe, glistening black and beckoning. A blackberry goes through stages, the boy remembered in his father’s voice, but he knew it too, from experience. First it’s a pretty little, white bloom—looks like an apple blossom, except its growing on a briar. Then it becomes a little, hard, green berry. These are pretty rough to eat. Bitter as sin, and got a hair on them that scratches on your tongue. It seems forever for the next stage to come, but eventually they plump up and turn red and tart, and then before you can wink, they are purple and black and juicy and sweet. If you don’t get them then, you risk letting them rot on the briar. You see one that looks so delicious, so black and fat, and when you try to pick it, it turns to mush between your fingers. If you were to taste it, it would taste like mud. It’s going back to clay, Wayne had said, since the Bible says everything comes out of clay.
The boy figured that the next day he
would come back with the pail and pick the first little crop of berries. Being the first, and being that the crop probably wasn’t in heavy, he would probably just get a pint or two—enough for a small cobbler—or if he wished it, enough to eat with milk and sugar.
He was walking back down the path with the taste of berries in his mouth, not thinking about much and feeling pretty safe because he had sneaked by the place where the grownups had been humping, when suddenly there was Venable sitting beside the path with a mason jar full of what the boy thought was water.
Venable had seen the boy first and he spoke to him roughly. The boy jumped and froze.
“You see anything you like, boy?” Venable had a lean face with strong cheekbones and the kind of gaunt facial muscles that seemed to pull at the edge of his lips. His eyes fixed on the boy and the boy felt he wanted to crawl out of his skin. “I’m talking to you, you little spying bastard. You see anything you like this morning?”
“No, suh.”
“No, you didn’t.” Venable drank from the jar and he cracked a smile. It was a funny, crooked smile that suggested that all the scare had been a joke and that he was a man who took nothing too seriously. “You must not have had any pussy before, then. Tell me,” his eyes were nearly twinkling now, “have you ever seen a cock as pretty as mine?”