“No, suh.”
“But you have seen plenty of cocks?”
The boy took a deep breath. “I reckon I have seen at least the one I got.”
“You’re trying to smart ass me, boy? Because you don’t know what I would do to you. I would cut off your gonads and feed them to the crows.” Venable was trying to look mean again, but he couldn’t hold the face. “You know what gonads are, boy?”
“You would go to jail if you did.”
Venable laughed. “Sit down here next to me. Come on. I’m just teasing you. I wouldn’t hurt you anyway.”
“You just said—”
“Haven’t you ever been teased? Shit, boy, I’ve got kids your age.”
“Yes, suh.” The boy sat down across the path from Venable.
“Sit over here, a little closer.”
“I feel close enough.”
Venable held out the jar to the boy. “Care for a drink?”
“No, suh.”
“Have you ever had a drink of water like this? It will make your pecker rise.”
“No, suh. I had a drink of water before I left the house.”
“What house did you leave? Whose boy are you anyway?”
“My daddy’s dead.”
“Who was your daddy?”
“Wayne Henson.”
Venable grunted and looked down at his hands. Then he took a sip from the jar, offered it toward the boy again, and then took another sip. “He was a mighty fine man. I knew him all my life.” Then his impishness returned. “Well, all of his life.” He pinched the sweat from his narrow nose. “Wayne was almost too good. Never had too much fun. But then they say, the good die young. No offense, boy. But I am not planning on dying young. What about you? Are you going to live a long, happy life, or are you going to die young and sad like your daddy?”
It shocked the boy to hear the stranger call his daddy sad. “My daddy wasn’t sad.”
“I beg to differ. Your daddy was the saddest, poorest son of a bitch in this county. I’ll tell you why. First, he was a good-looking man—not that I take much stock in a man’s looks—but he could have had just about any gal in this county including my own sister. But he let that one slip by. Of course, my momma would have killed them both, your daddy being white trash, but …” he sipped again, holding his finger in the air to hold the boy’s attention, “but, the Hensons were never trash. Wayne was always good, well-spoken, and did what he was supposed to do. That’s why he ended up with your momma and my sister with a rich Yankee up in Vermont—now, that just about killed Momma. But my philosophy is better a rich Yankee than a poor anything else.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Sister had a heavy crush on Wayne. I reckon I can see it. He was a tall, good-looking hombre, with that fair hair and—I guess you might call them—Aryan looks. That’s a funny thing. He was the first one in Talmaedge to run off to fight the Germans. That broke Sister’s heart—to see her old beau all decked up in a uniform, just as crisp as an autumn leaf, heading off to get his ass blown to shit by the Krauts.”
“He didn’t get killed by no Krauts.”
“Any Krauts, son. Say ‘any Krauts’, not ‘no Krauts.’ ‘No Krauts’ is nigger talk.”
“Bertrand don’t talk that way.”
“That’s because Bertrand is a proper-talking nigger. Anyway, I didn’t mean your daddy got killed in the war. I just meant that he could have been killed. Me, I got the farm exemption—being the only son and my daddy already dead from having been nagged to death by my momma. Besides, I was a little older than your daddy and a might bit smarter when it came to such foolishness as war. What’s it to me if Germans take over Europe? That’s over there, and it doesn’t affect me one damn bit. They can take over Europe, England, China—even New York City—just as long as they keep their grubbing hands off Thousand Acres.”
At the mention of Thousand Acres, the boy knew for sure he was talking to Vernon Venable, the man he had seen in the restaurant and who had killed Toby. It occurred to him that this realization should have awed him, but already he was beginning to feel the man not worthy of awe. “Bertrand said we had to fight for democracy.”
“What the hell does that nigger know about democracy?”
“He said Hitler was a bad dictator and wanted to make slaves out of Americans—even the white.”
“Shit, boy. Don’t believe everything you hear from that blue-gummed nigger. Bertrand’s problem is that he knows too much and doesn’t know a damn thing. Let me tell you, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
“Bertrand says that, too.”
“He does, does he? What the hell? Are you going to nigger school with him?”
“No, suh. He comes over and chops wood and stuff.”
Venable sipped and let the jar rest on his lap and against his raised knee. “And what stuff?”
“Different stuff. Weeding and putting in squash and stuff for Momma.”
Venable cocked his head and looked at the boy. He chuckled. “What else is he doing for your momma?”
The boy thought a second. “He plows, and he fixed the roof, sawed down a’ old tree. Momma try to pay him, but he don’t take no money. He say it’s because of the war he and Daddy was in together.”
“Were in together. Use correct agreement.”
“Yes, suh.” The boy fidgeted under Venable’s stare, the eyes sparkling and a mischievous smile playing around the lips.
“Now, you say he doesn’t take pay?”
“No, suh, he says—”
“What’s he doing that he doesn’t take any pay? He’s uppity, but I don’t suppose he thinks he’s rich.”
“He might be rich,” Lonnie pondered. “He got a car.”
“Car don’t make you rich. Now, how many times did he go into the house?”
“Our house? He don’t ever go into our house since Daddy died. He work on the outside.”
“He don’t take pay?”
“No, suh. Momma try to give it to him but he—”
“She comes out in the yard?” He rubbed his hands across his face.
“Yeah.”
“When he is there, she comes into the yard?”
“Yeah.” The boy felt uneasy. He remembered what his mother had admonished. “Of course, she do. It’s her yard. She come out to tell him what to do. How’s he going to know what to do if she don’t come out and tell him?”
“That’s all she’s doing?”
“Yes, suh.”
“She isn’t talking to him?”
The boy’s mind raced. “Of course she got to talk to tell him what to do, but she ain’t … what you trying to say? She courting him? Momma ain’t courting Bertrand. Momma my momma.”
“You think your momma can’t court? Your daddy’s gone—”
Lonnie stood up. “Momma can court if she wants to court, but she don’t want to court. She don’t want to court Bertrand, that’s for sure.”
Venable’s mouth formed a great, triangular smile. “How do you know she doesn’t want some of Bertrand’s big black dick?”
The boy fumbled for an answer, stood up, took a step away thinking he wouldn’t answer, and then turned back, his fist balled and leaning toward Venable. “If she wanted it, she would get it. But she don’t want it.”
Venable chuckled and slapped his hand on his thigh. “Son, you know I’m just teasing you. I am a great tease, you know. I just wanted to get a jerk out of you. Now, don’t be mad with me for my fun.” He chuckled again and added, “Please.”
“I got to be going on now, Mr. Venable. Momma will be worried about me.”
“But forgive me first.”
The boy considered. He had never talked to a grown-up this way, though he had been teased before. The man was asking forgiveness, and though he was angry still with him, he thought he ought to forgive. “OK. I forgive you. But I got to go on now.”
“You go on then, but son—?”
“Suh?”
“Let’s come to
an agreement.”
“Suh?”
“Don’t say a peep about what you saw earlier. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, suh.”
“I mean, don’t tell your momma. And by God, I’ll kill you if you tell Bertrand—have that nigger yapping my business around the whole county.”
“I won’t tell.”
“Good. Because I don’t want to tell what you told me.”
The boy’s stomach tightened. He couldn’t remember what he had said. “What’s that, suh?”
“About that nigger Bertrand and your momma.”
“He just helping her.”
“That’s what you say.” Venable sat up straight and took a sip. “You say he doesn’t take money.”
“No, suh.”
“What does he take?”
“Suh?”
“Boy, nobody in this world does something for nothing.” He softened. “We’ll just keep it quiet. It’s grown-up business and it can get a boy like you into a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“But—?”
“But do you understand me?”
The boy’s head swam. He didn’t think he understood. “Yes, suh.”
Venable pushed himself away from the tree like he was going to rise, but settled back. “Come here, son. Shake hands like a gentleman.” He put out his hand and the boy took it.
“Goddamn, your hand is rough. What have you been doing with these hands, boy?” He held onto the boy’s hand, feeling the palm with his fingertips. You’ve been stroking your log?”
“Yes, suh. I been helping Bertrand with the wood.”
Venable let go of the boy’s hand with mention of Bertrand’s name. “You go on and be good. Help your momma. If your momma needs any help you can’t give her, you let me know.”
“Yes, suh.” The boy walked a few steps and thought about the tomato slips, turned back. Venable had his hands in his lap. “Mr. Venable, we could use some tomato slips if you got a dozen or so you could spare.”
“Tomato shoots?”
“Yes, suh.”
“I’ll see to you.”
That was the last the boy heard of the tomato slips.
At first Lonnie thought the tall man who sat with his mother in the parlor was Vernon Venable. It startled him and he wondered if he were in trouble, then he thought that Venable had brought the tomato slips, answering his request in just a couple of hours. The man wore a khaki jacket; a brown fedora lay on the sofa beside him. He balanced a cup of coffee on his knee the way that Bertrand did. Aileen called him into the room to greet the man. It was Noland Jacks, the owner of Woodbine, the largest of the plantations in the county. He spoke politely to the man, and the man nodded at him. Now, the boy could see clearly that the man having soft features and doe-like eyes was not Venable. His mouth was much fuller than Venable’s, and his brown hair had only a bit of curl in it. His mother dismissed him. As he turned to go, his stomach knotted. Why is a rich man in our house? Jacks’s reputation was that he bought poor people’s property at unfair prices. If a farmer had had a low yield on tobacco or cotton, he might expect a visit from Jacks. His mother talked nervously, chattering away exactly the way she said she detested in Maribelle Crookshank. Lonnie thought there was even a bit of flirtation in her voice, and he turned back to look at her. She was not flirting, he saw; she was looking at her hands and he saw that they twisted one within the other. She asked him to go away again, but in a moment she called for him.
“My boy can tell you, Mr. Jacks,” she was saying as Lonnie came back into the room. “Bertrand is a good, kind man and he does good work for me. Outdoor work. I have tried to pay him, but he doesn’t take my money because my husband was a veteran.”
“He’s a patriotic man?”
“I reckon. Well, at least he is a helpful man. Look see, I am just a poor widow now. I am doing the best I can and I can use all the help I can get. Besides, my relations are in Savannah, and there is no one here to help me.”
Jacks placed his cup on the table and sat quietly on the sofa. He seemed to have been in deep contemplation. Aileen kept talking, repeating herself, looking to Lonnie for confirmation that what she said was the truth: that she offered Bertrand money every time he worked for her, and he never took it. “Once he said that I should buy something for the boy, a soda or a Moon Pie, and Lord knows I would have liked to, but my money is tight, Mr. Jacks. Bertrand, he’s a kind sort of man. A good Christian.”
Jacks cleared his throat. “Pardon my interposition, Mrs. Henson. I do respect your situation, and I am satisfied that there has been no impropriety on your part. I am only concerned that Bertrand might have overreached, and especially with the incident concerning Mr. Venable—an attack by one of Bertrand’s acquaintances—well, you can understand why I ask these difficult questions.”
“I do. I do. And I regret to this minute that I sold my baby’s crib to that nigger. Bertrand did ask me first, but it was Maribelle Crookshank that convinced me. Now if you want to talk about somebody that overreaches, you should talk to that Maribelle Crookshank.”
Jacks chuckled and nodded knowingly. “But he, that is Bertrand, has never set foot in this house.”
“Like I told you Mr. Jacks—I swear—only one time, in bad weather, my husband let him in. My boy and I went in the back room. They talked about that war, and Lord, we didn’t want to hear any of it. I said to Wayne, that this just wasn’t done. But Wayne—well, the war changed Wayne, Mr. Jacks. It’s hard to explain, he was still my Wayne, but there was something changed about him, too.” She cocked her head, started to explain, stopped. “I can’t explain how he changed, just that he was not the same boy he was when he went off to that damn war. I think he saw too much death and so he wanted to be good to people, just as good as he could be—”
“And that included Bertrand—”
“If he had lived, he might have become a preacher.”
They were silent for a minute.
“Sorry for your loss,” Jacks said. “And as I said before, I apologize for the intrusion, but you do understand how important it is. We have a good life here—a good system between the races. Everybody is happy with it.” Jacks smiled aloofly and picked his hat up from the sofa and put it on his knee.
“That’s what I always told Wayne—”
“And what’s your age, young man?”
The boy’s throat had been closed up to that point. He had wanted to say something about Bertrand, but was afraid of saying the wrong thing. “Ten, suh.”
“Ten.” Jacks shook his head. “You are a large boy for ten.” He turned to Aileen. “A handsome boy, ma’am. I’d always wanted a boy—children—but that’s yet to come.” With that, he rose from the sofa, pushing his tall frame from the seat. He tousled Lonnie’s hair as he passed toward the front door.
“Bertrand,” the boy blurted, “he’s good.”
“I’m sure he is.”
Aileen opened the door for Jacks and he passed by her to the stoop.
“He help put in the garden.”
Jacks nodded and said goodbye to Aileen.
“He split a cord of cooking wood.”
Again, Jacks nodded, heading toward his car.
“He helped Daddy get a job.”
Jacks turned to the boy, a quizzical look on his face. “He gave your father a job?”
“No,” Aileen interjected. “It … It was just some veteran’s papers or something. Something the Army sent here and Wayne asked him about it, Bertrand being a teacher and everything. Nothing ever came of it.”
“Is that right?”
“You can see nothing ever came of it or we wouldn’t still be here.” Aileen laughed.
“Boy,” Jacks asked, “what kind of job?”
Aileen placed her hand on Lonnie’s shoulder and squeezed. Tension ran through his body. He looked at his mother, whose face had tightened around the mouth. “I don’t know,” he said, not sure that he was audible.
“You don’t know—”
/> “No, he doesn’t. He is just ten years old. He don’t know and I don’t know either, Mr. Jacks, because there was no job. It was a paper from the Army, that’s all I know about it. Like I said, that war changed Wayne.”
Jacks stared a second, then nodded, thanked Aileen for her time and drove away.
EIGHT
The morning after he witnessed the murders, Lonnie, dew-dampened after a night in the woods, stumbled into the house. The kitchen was quiet and cold, and he thought his mother would not yet be in her day clothes, but he found her dressed and sitting in the parlor. Stumbling forward through the gingham curtain that divided the parlor from the rest of the house, he managed one syllable of her name, but the other syllable was muted by what felt like a great bladder of tears that bulged behind his eyes and throat. After a moment, he caught his breath and called her, “Momma!” She did not move, not even to look up at him, but sat in the upholstered chair with her face turned toward her lap where her hands lay, one on top of the other. “Momma!” His tone softened and narrowed, whittled down by concern for her. Is she dead? He touched her on the arm, just below the shoulder, and she pulled her arm away. Still, not looking up, she said, keenly, “I told you to stay away from that nigger. I told you.” She looked up and he saw, in the warm light that filtered through the cotton curtains at the window, that her eyes were swollen and red.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. She turned her face away from him, and then he noticed her clothes, her apron, and he realized that she had not changed from the day before. “Have you been to bed?”
“No,” she said, turning back to him now, her lips trembling. “And where have you been, Lonnie?” Now she extended her hand to him and pulled him in close to her, and pressed her wet cheek against his neck. “Where have you been! Where?”
He started to answer, but his throat shut off again and his mind spun with what he had seen and what he had feared when he first saw her. “Blackberries …,” he blurted.
She slapped his face.
“Blackberries? Goddamn blackberries. You’ve been picking blackberries all night? Who you been talking to? Did you tell anything to Mr. Jacks about Bertrand? I told you not to say a word. I told you to stay away from Bertrand. I told you he was trouble—”
The Vain Conversation Page 9