Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  The girls slept late that morning. They had earned their rest, and Harriet went tiptoeing about the house listening for them to call for the breakfast that old Mattie had promised to serve them in bed. When ten o’clock came she had picked up in her room, given a last dusting to Son’s room and to the guest room, and Mattie had swept the screened porch and was through in the kitchen. It was time to go to market. Mattie had much to do that day and it was not planned for her to go marketing with Harriet. But the girls had been such angels that Harriet and Mattie agreed they should be allowed to sleep as late as their hearts desired.

  Mattie put on her straw and in Harriet’s presence she was on the back porch giving B.T. some last instructions. B.T. was cleaning six frying-size chickens from their own yard. Later he must peel potatoes and gather beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and okra from what was known as the girls’ victory garden. He was acknowledged a good hand at many services which could be rendered on the back porch, and his schedule there over the coming holiday weekend was a full one. “Have you cleaned up the freezer?” Harriet asked him. She too was standing with her hat on. She was looking critically at the naked chicken on which his black hands were operating with a small paring knife. Before he answered concerning the freezer she had turned to Mattie and said, “Don’t serve the necks tonight, Mattie.” Meanwhile B.T. had crossed the porch and brought back the big wooden bucket of the ice-cream freezer. The bucket itself had been scrubbed wonderfully clean, and with eyes directed toward her but focused for some object that would have been far behind her, B.T. exhibited the immaculate turner and metal container from within. “It does look grand, B.T.,” Harriet admitted.

  She was about to depart when she heard one of the girls’ voices through their window across the way. (The rear of the house was of a U-shape with the big pantries and the kitchen in one wing and the bedrooms in the other.) Harriet went down through the yard and looked in the girls’ window. She was astonished to find the room in complete order and the girls fully dressed and each seated on her own bed reading. Harriet’s eyes were immediately filled with tears. She thought of how hard they had worked this week and with what unaccustomed deference they had treated her, calling her “Mama” sometimes instead of “Mother,” sometimes even being so playful as to call her “Mammy.” And this morning they had not wanted to be a bother to anyone. Further, they were reading something new so that they would be conversant with Son and Miss Prewitt. Kate jumped from the bed and said, “Why, Mammy, you’re ready to go to market. I’ll be right with you.” Harriet turned from the window and called to Mattie to take off her straw, for Miss Kate was going to market with her.

  But she didn’t begin to walk toward the garage at once. The tears had left her eyes, and she stood thinking quite clearly of this change in her daughters’ behavior. She was ashamed of having thought it would be necessary to mention their quarreling and their late hours to them. Perhaps they had worried as much as she about Son’s getting into the Army, and probably they were as eager to make him proud of his family before Miss Prewitt.

  As all of her concern for the success of the visit cleared away she began to think of what a pity it was that Son and Miss Prew­itt were not in love. She would have suspected that it might really be a romance except that the girls assured her otherwise. They told her that Son did not believe in marriage and that he certainly would not subject his family and the people of Nashville to the sort of thing he did believe in. This girl was merely one of the people he knew in his publishing business. And thinking again of all Son’s advanced ideas and his intolerance she could not but think of the unhappiness he was certain to know in the Army. And more than this there would be no weekly telephone calls for her and perhaps no letters and no periodic visits home. He would be going away from them all and he might just be missing and never be brought home for burial. Her imagination summoned for comfort the warmth of Sweetheart’s smile and the feel of his arm about her, but there was little comfort even there.

  When they returned from market they found Helena on the back porch peeling the potatoes. “What on earth is Helena doing?” Kate asked before they got out of the coupe. Harriet frowned and pressed the horn for B.T. to come and get the groceries. Then the tall daughter and the short little mother scrambled out of the car and hurried toward the porch. Almost as soon as the coupe appeared Helena had stood up. She took three long strides to the edge of the porch. When her mother and sister drew near, her eyes seemed ready to pop out of her head. Her mouth, which was large and capable of great expansions, was full open. Yet the girl was speechless.

  Harriet was immediately all atremble and she felt the blood leaving her lips. To herself she said, “Something terrible has—” Then simultaneously she saw that Helena’s eyes were fixed on something behind Kate and herself and she heard old Mattie’s broken voice calling to her, “Miss Harriet! Oh, Missie, Missie!” She turned about quickly, dropping her eyes to her feet to make sure of her footing, and now looking up she saw the old Negro woman running toward her with her big faded kitchen apron clasped up between her clean, buff-colored hands.

  The old-fashioned appellative “Missie” told Harriet a great deal. She handed Kate her purse and put out her arms to receive Mattie, for she knew that her old friend was in deep trouble. The Negress was several inches taller than Harriet but she threw herself into her little mistress’s arms and by bending her knees slightly and stooping her shoulders she managed to rest her face on the bosom of the white eyelet dress while she wept. Harriet held her so for a time with her arms about her and patting her gently between the shoulder blades and just above the bow knot of her apron strings. “Now, now, Mattie,” she whispered, “maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. It’s something about B.T., isn’t it? What is it, Mattie, honey?”

  “Oh, oh, oh, he gwine leave.”

  The voice seemed so expressive of the pain in that heart that Harriet could think only of the old woman’s suffering and not at all of the cause. “My poor Mattie,” she said.

  But her sympathy only brought forth more tears and deeper sobs. “My little nephew is gwine leave his old auntie who raised him up when nobody else’d tetch him.” Harriet did not even hear what Mattie was saying now, but she perceived that her own sympathy was encouraging self-pity and thus giving the pain a double edge. And so she tried to think of some consolation.

  “Maybe he won’t go after all, Mattie.”

  Saying this she realized the bearing of B.T.’s departure upon the holiday weekend of which this was the very eve. Then she told herself that indeed Mattie’s little nephew would not go after all. “He won’t go,” she said; “I tell you, Mattie, he won’t go if I have any power of constraining him.” Her blue eyes shone thoughtfully as she watched the two girls who were now making the last of several trips to bring the groceries from the back of the coupe.

  “Oh, oh, oh, yes’m he will, Missie. He’s gwine Tuesday. It’s the war, an’ y’can’t stop ’m. He gwine work at th’air fact’ry ’cause the draf membuhs don’t want ’m much. But iffen he don’t work at th’air fact’ry they’ll have to take ’im, want ’im or not.” And while his auntie was speaking B.T. appeared from the door of the unpainted cabin from which Mattie had come. He was still wearing the white coat which he always wore on the back porch, and plainly intended to continue his work through the weekend. He ran over to the car where Kate was unloading the last of the groceries and relieved her of her armful.

  Harriet’s relief was great. B.T. would be here through Monday! She began to caress Mattie again and to speak softly in her ear. Her eyes and her thoughts, however, were upon B.T. He was a big—neither muscular nor fat, merely big—black, lazy-looking Negro. As he came along the brick walk toward her he kept his eyes lowered to the bundle of groceries. He was what Harriet’s Mama would have called a field nigger and had never learned any house manners at all. His face, to her, had ever seemed devoid of expression. He had grown up here on their suburban acreage and had been hardly more than twenty miles distant in
his lifetime, but Harriet felt that she had held less converse with him than with any of the men who used to come for short intervals and do the work when B.T. was still a child. He worked hard and long and efficiently here on their small acreage, she knew, and on Saturday nights he usually got drunk down at the Negro settlement and sometimes spent the later part of that night and all day Sunday in the county jail. There had been times when he had stolen pieces of Sweetheart’s and Son’s clothing off the wash line, and you dare not lose any change in the porch stairs. Sometimes too they would find that he was keeping some black female thing out in the shack for a week at a time, toting food to her from the kitchen. The female things he kept were not Negro women who might have been useful about the place but were real prostitutes from Nashville (who else would have endured the smell there must be in that shack?), and Dr. Wilson was ever and anon having to take him to Nashville for the shots. But all of that sort of thing was to be expected, admitted Harriet, and it was not that which caused her antipathy—over and above his constitutional affliction—toward him. B.T. was simply wanting in those qualities which she generally found appealing in Negroes. He had neither good manners nor the affectionate nature nor the appealing humor that so many niggers have.

  As he passed her there at the foot of the porch steps the odor he diffused had never seemed more repugnant and never so strong when outside the house. Mattie raised her tear-streaked brown face, knowing it was B.T. surely more from his odor than from his footstep, and as he followed the two girls to the kitchen door she called after him, “B.T., don’t leave old Auntie!” Then she looked at her mistress with what Harriet acknowledged to be the sweetest expression she had ever beheld in a Negro’s countenance. “Miss Harriet,” she said as though stunned at her own thoughts, “it’s like you losin’ Mr. Son. B.T. is gwine too.”

  The small white woman abruptly withdrew her arms from about her servant. The movement was made in one fearful gesture which included the sudden contraction of her lips and the widening of her bright eyes. “Mattie!” she declaimed. “How dare you? That will be just exactly enough from you!” And now her eyes moved swiftly downward and to the porch steps. Without another glance at the woman she had been holding to her bosom she went up on the porch and, avoiding the kitchen where the girls were, she went along the porch up into the U of the house and entered the dark dining room. While she walked her face grew hot and cold alternately as her indignation rose and rose again. When she reached her own room in the far wing of the house she closed the door and let the knob turn to in her hand. She pulled off her hat and dropped it on her dressing table among her toilet articles and handkerchief box and stray ends of gray hair that were wrapped around a hairpin. And she went and sat down in a rocking chair near the foot of the bed and began to rock. “Like Son! Like Son!”

  The very chair had violence in its rocking motion. Several times Harriet might have pushed herself over backward but for lacking the strength in her small legs. Not since she was a little child had such rage been known to her bosom, and throughout the half hour of her wildest passion she was rather aware of this. This evidence of a choleric temperament was so singular a thing for her that she could not but be taking note of herself as her feelings rose and convulsed in their paroxysm. She wondered first that she had refrained from striking Mattie out in the yard and she remarked it humorlessly that only the approaching holiday had prevented her. The insinuation had been sufficiently plain without Mattie’s putting it into words. It was her putting it into words that earned Harriet’s wrath. The open comparison of Son’s departure to that of the sullen, stinking, thieving, fornicating black B.T. was an injury for which Son could not avenge himself, and she felt it her bounden duty to in some way make that black woman feel the grossness of her wrong and ultimately to drive her off the premises. And it was in this vein, this very declamatory language, this elevated tone with which Harriet expressed herself in the solitude of her room. She was unconsciously trying to use the language and the rhetoric of her mother and of the only books with which she had ever had such acquaintance. Between the moments when she even pictured Mattie’s being tied and flogged or thought of Mama’s uncle who shot all of his niggers before he would free them, and of the Negro governor of North Carolina and the Negro senate rolling whiskey barrels up the capitol steps, of the rape and uprisings in Memphis and the riots in Chicago, between these thoughts she would actually consider the virtue of her own wrath. And recalling her Greek classes at Miss Hood’s school she thought without a flicker of humor of Achilles’ indignation.

  Not the least of the offense was the time that Mattie had chosen. Harriet was powerless to act until this long Fourth of July was over. She meant to endure the presence of that Ethiopian woman and that ape of a man through Sunday and Monday, till her own boy had had his holiday and gone to join the Army. His last visit must not be marred, and she resolved to tell no one—not even Sweetheart—of what had occurred. The holiday would be almost intolerable to her now, and she stopped her furious rocking, and with her feet set side by side on the carpet she resolved to endure it in silence for his sake who was the best of all possible sons. Sweat was running down her forehead, and her little hands hung limp and cold.

  People in Nashville had been saying for a week how Son would be missed. More than most boys, even those who had not left Nashville to work in New York or St. Louis, Son would be missed by his family when he went to the Army. People said that he had been a model son while he was growing up. And after his own talents and ability took him away to New York he had been so good about keeping in touch. He had written and telephoned and visited home regularly. That was what the older people remarked. And the young people no less admired the faithfulness and consideration he showed his parents. He had carried all the honors in his classes at school and at the University and had not grieved his parents with youthful dissipation as most Nashville boys do. What the young people thought especially fine was that, being the intellectual sort, which he certainly was, he had been careful never to offend or embarrass his family with the peculiar, radical ideas which he would naturally have. After he left Nashville he never sent home magazines in which his disturbing articles appeared, not even to his sisters who pretended to have the same kind of mind. And finally when the wild stories about his private and semipublic activities began to come back to Nashville and circulate among people, people were not so displeased with these stories as they were pleased to find on his next visit that he behaved as of old while in Nashville.

  He was a tall, fair-headed young man, softly spoken, and he dressed conventionally. When he came into his mother’s front hall that Saturday afternoon on the second of July he was still wearing the seersucker suit in which he had traveled. Harriet was not at the door to greet him, but as she came from her room she could hear amid the flurry of greetings his polite voice asking in his formal way if she were well. She met him at the door of the parlor and as she threw her arms about him she found herself unable to restrain her tears.

  She thought, of course, that her weeping would subside in a moment and she did not even hide her face in her handkerchief. She tried to speak to him and then pushing him a little aside she tried to say something to the young woman he had brought with him. But the sight of Miss Prewitt there beside Sweetheart seemed to open new valves and it seemed that she was beginning to choke. When she had first seen Son in the doorway his very appearance had confirmed the justice of her outraged feelings this afternoon. When she saw the ladylike young woman in a black traveling dress and white gloves (as an example of his taste), it occurred to her that she had even underestimated the grossness of Mattie’s reflection upon him. Her weeping became so violent now and was so entirely a physical thing that it seemed not to correspond to her feelings at all. First she tried to stifle and choke down her tears physically. This failing, she tried to shame herself into composure, thinking of what a vulgar display Mama would have called this. Presently she recognized that her state was already hysteria. Sweetheart
rushed forward and supported her, and Son tried to hold one hand which she was waving about.

  They walked her slowly to her room speaking to her gently. All the while she was trying at moments to think of the reason for this collapse. It was not—as they would all believe—Son’s going into the Army. It could not be simply the scene she had had with her cook that afternoon. Could it be that she had always hated this black, servant race and felt them a threat to her son and her family? Such ridiculous thoughts! Then she was alternately laughing and weeping, and they put her on her bed. Sweetheart attended her and then sat holding her hand till she was absolutely quiet. Later the girls took their turns at sitting with her. All she could remember about Son that afternoon was hearing him say, out in the hall it seemed, “How unlike Mother.”

  It was late in the evening before they would let her move from her bed or leave her room. But by ten o’clock Sweetheart was convinced that her fretting there in bed was more harmful than a little company up in the front room would be. She declared herself to be quite recovered and after a bit of washing and powdering she presented herself to the four young people who were playing bridge in the parlor.