“No,” said Jacks. The image was fresh in his mind, the orange flames and the charring body.
Venable sipped on his beer. He looked seriously at Jacks, eye to eye. Jacks could see Venable’s eyes still bright with excitement. “Have you ever wondered,” Venable said, “why it is that when you cook a chicken it smells so good and you want to eat it, but when you cook a man, it smells so foul?”
“No,” said Jacks.
“Have you ever thought about eating a man, like those cannibals in Africa?”
Jacks didn’t answer. He walked to the edge of the yard, where the periwinkle was beginning to warm in the sun, and vomited.
EIGHTEEN
In the week following “the incident,” as Jacks referred to the murders of Bertand, his wife, Jimmy Lee and his girlfriend, he left Woodbine only once. On the first morning after, he went out to the fields to supervise the workers. The workers were quieter than usual, and he imagined that they were thinking about the murders. He hoped that they didn’t associate him with them, and he looked for signs of fear or resentment in their faces. Their faces seemed empty of anything except servility. The servility he trusted, but the emptiness he did not. Once he made the mistake of asking the whereabouts of Jimmy Lee, and even then the workers’ faces showed nothing he could perceive, not surprise at his mistake, not grief for Jimmy Lee. He asked, too, about finding a replacement for Jimmy Lee, but no one was forthcoming.
Returning to the house, he washed and dressed for breakfast, but coming into the dining room, he did not find hot biscuits and jam waiting, or hear Milledge’s quick movements in the kitchen. After an hour of waiting for Milledge, he drove into town to eat at Maribelle’s Diner. Assuming Milledge was busy with funeral arrangements, he asked Maribelle to send a girl to help him until Milledge returned. Maribelle, however, was indignant. She said that there had been no reason to kill her cook. The cook had been a good girl, and nobody fried chicken better than she. Now she, herself, was looking for a replacement. Jacks ate a sloppily cooked breakfast, made by Maribelle herself, and left. The next morning, he boiled his own eggs and ate them with light bread he had bought at the store. “Wonder Bread” it was called. It was a wonder any one could eat it, he thought.
For dinner, he made sandwiches of coldcuts and light bread, and that evening, Betty sent a girl around to ask him to come over to Thousand Acres for supper. The thought of sitting with Venable sickened him, and he snapped at the girl, telling her that Hell hadn’t frozen over. The next evening, the girl came with a plate of food in a basket. He ate the food, but he didn’t want to see Betty, Venable, Cook, or anyone from town. The next days, he busied himself on the farm, walking around the pastures to take note of the size and readiness of his beef, supervising the sheep shearing, overseeing the castration of the shoats. In the evenings, after the workers left, he sat on the porch with his pipe and remembered his father and his mother.
Late on the fifth night, he walked through the house without turning on the lights, without turning on a radio, or reading a newspaper, and found his bed. Outside there was lightning. He stripped off his clothes down to his strap shirt and boxers and knelt beside the bed in prayer. His prayers had always been perfunctory, a brief acknowledgment of a greater power, but this night when he closed his eyes, images of the murders flashed in his mind. There was the brown, bloodied belly of Maribelle’s girl, with its big cave of a navel and stretch marks. He had never seen a pregnant woman’s belly before, and it now gave him a sharp sense of inadequacy never to have fathered a child. There was Bertrand’s overly proud face, ballooning in his mind. Even cut and bruised, he looked proud, as proud as the morning he had come to ask for help, looking every bit as tar-black and liver-lipped as his father, Johnson. When someone, perhaps it was Cook’s deputy, had said, “Nothing personal,” Bertrand had replied, “It’s personal to me.” The crowd had gathered thickly around Bertrand, so Jacks had not seen when Bertrand was shot, but afterwards, he saw where the heels of the shiny oxfords had plowed a trough in the sand as the man died.
Since he did not want to think about these things, he stopped his prayers. He lay on top of his bed, his head elevated by pillows, and listened to the rain and mild thunder. The pillow cases smelled fresh from washing and reminded him of Milledge. He realized how integral to the house Milledge had become. Everything in the house smelled of her. She was in the washing, down to his underwear. She was the lemony smell of the furniture polish and its gloss upon the tables. How he moved around the house in the dark, a long learned routine, had been determined by her placement of furniture. His mother had originally placed the furniture, but slowly, Milledge had supplanted his mother’s design, and after he remodeled the kitchen, there was nothing to be seen of his mother in that room. It was all Milledge’s. All Millie’s.
The next morning, sitting down to his boiled eggs, he came across a letter in the mail. The handwriting, strained and angular, was familiar; it was Milledge’s. He hesitated before he opened the envelope, but tore off an edge and blew it open and pulled out a folded sheet, stenciled with a flower design. The letter read: “Dear Mr. Jacks, I am not coming back. Sincerely, Milledge Johnson.” He stared a while at the letter, his mind blank, trying to comprehend what it really meant. She was not coming back, he pondered. But where had she gone? His heart suddenly throbbed and he stood up from the table, holding the page in front of him, reading it over and over again. Suddenly he had the feeling that he had hurt Milledge deeply, and the feeling surprised him. But of course, he thought, she had expected that he would have protected Bertrand. Perhaps this was her way of getting back at him for the murders. “But it is just as much Bertrand’s fault as it is mine,” he said to himself. He tore the letter, then crumpled it. Damn fool woman, he thought. Now she’s gone off the deep end. He tried to eat, but couldn’t. He walked around in the house. It had become disorderly in just five days. He had to get somebody in to clean it or he would have to do it himself. He went out to the fields again, surprising the workers with the break in routine. Later, he hotwired Bertrand’s car and ordered one of his workers to drive it to Milledge’s house. The sight of it disturbed him.
When Betty’s girl brought around supper, he asked if she knew how Milledge was doing. “I heah right hard, suh,” was all he got out of her. Later, smoking his pipe on the porch, he tried to imagine how Milledge might have felt. Bertrand was her eldest son, and it must have driven some sort of hole through her existence to have lost him. He recalled how he felt when his mother had died. It had been a sharply felt absence at first, but slowly it filled with memory. However, in the first days, he recalled how he seemed in a daze, how disordered existence had become, and how acutely physical the grief had been. He did not wish that on Milledge. He thought about what he might do to comfort her, perhaps send her a wreath of flowers. She liked flowers she had once told him.
That night passed restlessly, and he did not fall asleep until the sun was up. When he awoke, he realized he was late to instruct the workers, and rushing to the fields, found them earnestly engaged in the day’s tasks. When he returned to the house, he saw that the screen door was ajar and he rushed in hoping to see Milledge. No one was in the kitchen and he concluded that he had left the door ajar on his rush out to the fields. He saw the crumpled letter on the table and spread it flat. The floral stencil reminded him of the dress that Bertrand’s wife had worn.
That afternoon, he drove into Bethany, to Perkins’ Funeral Home to buy flowers.
“When do you need the flowers?” the wife of the proprietor asked.
He said he wanted them right now. Today.
“But when is the funeral?”
He said he didn’t know.
“Well, then,” the woman said, “Who has the body?”
He told her he didn’t know, that it was a colored funeral.
“Oh, a colored funeral. Probably Jefferson’s over in Greene. That’s where most of the colored around here go. I can call and find out.”
Impat
iently, he told her he didn’t care who had the bodies, he would take the flowers himself.
“More than one? Do you mean the big funeral for them colored rascals? You don’t want me to send flowers over for them, do you? Those murdering, raping rascals. A gang of them, too. Like Bonnie and Clyde. Now, you know, Mr. Jacks, that wouldn’t look right,” she said firmly. “Besides, those funerals were yesterday. All of them together. Four caskets up in that tiny River of Joy. I’d supposed every colored soul in Talmaedge County was there.” She gave him a quizzical look. “Didn’t you hear about it? They had to deputize some of the local men, Mr. Perkins included, to make sure there was no trouble of any kind.”
He said that not only hadn’t he heard, he didn’t care. He only wanted the flowers. She went away and came back with a small wreath of lilies. It was for a funeral over in Madison, but she could make another one before it was needed.
With the delivery of the flowers as an excuse, Jacks went to visit Milledge.
They must have heard the car plowing through the slew of mud and whining and spinning long before he got to the yard of the little house because a man was standing on the porch waiting for him. He was a light-skinned man, favoring Bertrand, but Jacks didn’t remember ever having seen him. Getting out of the car with the wreath held at his side, Jacks approached the man. The man didn’t move away from the top of the stairs. This and the quick, alert way he talked made Jacks think that the man must have been some of Milledge’s people from the North. The man told Jacks that Milledge was very ill since the murders, and surely anyone would understand why she didn’t want to be bothered.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She is distressed.”
“Distressed?”
“Yes. Distressed. You know, upset.”
“I know what ‘distressed’ means.”
The man didn’t say anything for a moment, only stared down at Jacks, meeting him at the eye.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m W.B. Johnson.”
“You a schoolteacher or something?”
“I am a professor. I teach mathematics.”
A professor, Jacks thought. His mouth turned down at the corners. “Arithmetic? But you don’t live around here, do you?”
“Not anymore.”
“But you did once?” Then it occurred to Jacks that he was speaking to Milledge’s younger son. “You must be Milledge’s other boy.”
“I’m her son, Mr. Jacks. I haven’t been a boy in a long time.”
Jacks thought how he would like to teach this man a lesson. Nothing drastic. Just slap him beside his head. “When do you think Millie is going to be well, son?”
The man shifted on his feet and crossed his arms. “I don’t know.”
“Well, what did the doctor say?”
“He didn’t say anything. But I imagine that it will be quite a while, Mr. Jacks. It may be hard for you to understand since you have never had a family, but my mother just lost her child. True, he was a grown man, but he was her child—her first born. And it isn’t the kind of thing that you say, ‘Oh, he lived a good long life,’ or ‘God had mercy on him to take him.’ It isn’t a kind of thing like a car accident where you say, ‘Nobody could have stopped it from happening.’ This was a cold-blooded killing. Somebody planned it. Somebody put a gun to his head. Somebody pulled the trigger. The thing that hurts me is that my brother went over and fought the Nazis to keep—”
“I know all that. And don’t you presume to know how I feel. I feel—I feel bad for Milledge, and for the family, too. It was a terrible thing what happened to Bertrand. Now, you might not believe me—I don’t expect you or any colored person in Talmaedge to—I feel just terrible about this wretched thing. But I can’t bring them back.”
Jacks could see W. B.’s face flush. The young man shifted from foot to foot, like he might spring down the steps at any moment.
“You can find the ones who did it,” W.B. said thickly.
This boy might not make it out of the county tonight. Jacks took a breath to control himself. “W. B., I know you are upset, so I’ll just remind you once. It is talk like that that got Bertrand in trouble. Now, we’ve got a sheriff’s department; we don’t need any outside interference.”
“Maybe you do.”
There was quiet for a moment while Jacks looked the man over. He was a soft-looking man, tall, in his twenties, and already balding. He was well groomed and wore starched clothes and dress shoes. A professor! What could he profess, teaching ’rithmetic to a bunch of colored monkeys? Jacks took in a slow, deep breath and spoke heavily. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go around saying things like that. You know as well as I know that the Klan killed Bertrand and they would have killed me, too, if I had gotten in their way. Now, I’d be careful, if I were you, because they aren’t above killing a schoolteacher from up North.”
“Is that a threat?”
This boy is stupid. He is asking for it. “I don’t make threats, son. I don’t have to. But if the Klan wants you, there isn’t a place on Earth you can hide. Now, I’m not in the business of giving advice, but let me tell you this because you are Millie’s boy. Get your black ass back to Detroit or Chicago, and keep your big mouth shut. Stick to teaching your A-B-Cs or whatever you teach.”
Again, the young man flushed in the face. Even his neck turned pink, and Jacks saw his fists clench. He was about to speak again when the door opened and Milledge came out, supported by a woman who looked nearly white. Milledge looked old to Jacks, though he knew she was just over forty. Her face looked as if it had fallen—every feature sagged, the eyes, the lips, and the cheeks. Her hair was nearly all salt and pepper, hair he had never seen because she had always worn a scarf at his house.
“Millie!” His voice betrayed his shock at her appearance.
“Mr. Jacks!” she countered, a sharpness in her tone he hadn’t heard before. “What can I do for you?”
“Well … I … was … I’m sorry, Millie. I’m sorry I disturbed you. I was just hoping you would be coming back to Woodbine in a couple of days.”
“No sir,” she nearly whispered. “I can’t make it. Not right now.”
She looked away from him and let out a deep breath. For a moment he thought she wouldn’t breathe in again. “I ain’t even trying to take it no more, Mr. Jacks. It done took me.”
He raised the wreath, offering it to her, but no one reached to accept it. He nodded, recognizing that for the moment there was an unbridgeable breach between Milledge and himself. He laid the wreath at the bottom of the stairs, and, nodding again, went to the car. On the way back up that muddy drive, he knew he couldn’t do another thing to Milledge. He would send her some money. A hundred dollars was good. She had been a good worker, and maybe in a month or two, her grief would quell. She might come back to him. But for now, he thought, he would have to find another girl.
He drove toward home, and slowed when he got to the driveway. At the other end of the shady drive, Woodbine looked more like a haunted house than his home. There were already too many ghosts there, he thought. His grandfather’s, his mother’s, and his father’s, and now, he was afraid it would be haunted by Jimmy Lee and Bertrand and Millie, too. The workers would be expecting him to make his afternoon round of inspection, but he couldn’t face any colored people just then, with their suspicious looks and whispers about him. Why did he worry about it so? Venable had far more to do with the incident than he, and Venable was probably somewhere fucking a colored girl. He continued past Woodbine, feeling a bit aimless. When he began to descend the slope going down toward the bridge, he gassed the car, letting the heavy vehicle speed toward the bottom. It felt for a moment that the car would take flight, zigzagging in the road. His stomach felt as if it were rising up in his chest, and when the car bounced and slammed into the bed of the bridge, he kept gassing it. Again it bounced when it left the bridge bed and started to climb out of the bottoms. All this time, he did not look below him at the river.
Maribelle gave him a cold look when he came into the diner. She was serving Cook and his two of his deputies. He nodded at Cook and took a booth in front of the window looking over Main Street, busy with people headed home from work.
“I’m still mad with you,” Maribelle said. She took out an ordering pad and held her pencil poised above it. “What can I get for you, Noland?”
Jacks hadn’t looked at the menu. “How about some fried chicken?”
Maribelle snorted. “That’s what I’m mad about, Noland.” She looked around the restaurant. There were only Cook, his deputies, and a couple. She slipped into the booth and sat across from him. “My new girl doesn’t fry chicken. Not that that’s all I’m mad about. I just don’t see why y’all had to kill Beah. That girl was as innocent as the day is long. Just because she was tangled up with that rascal doesn’t mean she did anything to deserve what happened to her—”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Jacks whispered sharply. He looked across at Cook. “Don’t say that I did. If I hear you say it again, there will be consequences for you.”
Maribelle pursed her lips. “Well … it’s what I heard.”
“You heard wrong.” He regarded the woman, who now would not look him in the eye. She was about his age, he knew, but her full, rosy cheeks and lively eyes gave her the appearance of a younger woman. His anger at her presumption faded quickly and he became aware of a feeling of emptiness and regret. He was hungry, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking out of the window. “You were there, though.”
“Yes.”
“All the colored folks say you had a part in it. That’s all I know.”
“Did you ask your friend Cook?” He glanced at the sheriff, whose mouth was stuffed with food.
“Well, I assumed—”
“You can’t believe everything people say, much less anything a colored person says.”
The Vain Conversation Page 22