Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Crecie, however, knew her mama was not honest-to-God mean and hadn’t ever been mean to the Tolliver children, the way the Blalocks liked to make out she had. All the Tolliver children but Mr. Thad and Mr. Will had quarreled with her for good by the time they were grown, but they had quarreled with the old Doctor, too (and as if they were the only ones who shook off their old folks this day and time). When Crecie talked about her mama, she didn’t spare her anything, but she was fair to her, too. And it was in no hateful or disloyal spirit that she took part in the conspiracy that finally got Aunt Munsie and her slop wagon off the streets of Thornton. Crecie would have done the same for any neighbor. She had small part enough, actually, in that conspiracy. Her part was merely to break the news to Aunt Munsie that there was now a law against keeping pigs within the city limits. It was a small part but one that no one else quite dared to take.

  “They ain’t no such law!” Aunt Munsie roared back at Crecie. She was slopping her pigs when Crecie came to the fence and told her about the law. It had seemed the most appropriate time to Lucrecie. “They ain’t never been such a law, Crecie,” Aunt Munsie said. “Every house on Jackson and Jefferson used to keep pigs.”

  “It’s a brand-new law, Mama.”

  Aunt Munsie finished bailing out the last of the slop from her wagon. It was just before twilight. The last, weak rays of the sun colored the clouds behind the mock orange tree in Crecie’s yard. When Aunt Munsie turned around from the sty, she pretended that that little bit of light in the clouds hurt her eyes, and turned away her head. And when Lucrecie said that everybody had until the first of the year to get rid of their pigs, Aunt Munsie was in a spell of deafness. She headed out toward the crib to get some corn for the chickens. She was trying to think whether anybody else inside the town still kept pigs. Herb Mallory did—two doors beyond Crecie. Then Aunt Munsie remembered Herb didn’t pay town taxes. The town line ran between him and Shad Willis.

  That was sometime in June, and before July came, Aunt Munsie knew all there was worth knowing about the conspiracy. Mr. Thad and Mr. Will had each been in town for a day during the spring. They and their families had been to her house and sat on the porch; the children had gone back to look at her half-grown collie dog and the two hounds, at the old sow and her farrow of new pigs, and at the frizzliest frizzly chicken Aunt Munsie had ever had. And on those visits to Thornton, Mr. Thad and Mr. Will had also made their usual round among their distant kin and close friends. Everywhere they went, they had heard of the near-accidents Aunt Munsie was causing with her slop wagon and the real danger there was of her being run over. Miss Lucille Satterfield and Miss Patty Bean had both been to the mayor’s office and also to see Judge Lawrence to try to get Aunt Munsie “ruled” off the streets, but the men in the courthouse and in the mayor’s office didn’t listen to the women in Thornton any more. And so either Mr. Thad or Mr. Will—how would which one of them it was matter to Munsie?—had been prevailed upon to stop by Mayor Lunt’s office, and in a few seconds’ time had set the wheels of conspiracy in motion. Soon a general inquiry had been made in the town as to how many citizens still kept pigs. Only two property owners besides Aunt Munsie had been found to have pigs on their premises, and they, being men, had been docile and reasonable enough to sell what they had on hand to Mr. Will or Mr. Thad Tolliver. Immediately afterward—within a matter of weeks, that is—a town ordinance had been passed forbidding the possession of swine within the corporate limits of Thornton. Aunt Munsie had got the story bit by bit from Miss Leonora and Miss Patty and Miss Lucille and others, including the constable himself, whom she did not hesitate to stop right in the middle of the square on a Saturday noon. Whether it was Mr. Thad or Mr. Will who had been prevailed upon by the ladies she never ferreted out, but that was only because she did not wish to do so.

  The constable’s word was the last word for her. The constable said yes, it was the law, and he admitted yes, he had sold his own pigs—for the constable was one of those two reasonable souls—to Mr. Thad or Mr. Will. He didn’t say which of them it was, or if he did, Aunt Munsie didn’t bother to remember it. And after her interview with the constable, Aunt Munsie never again exchanged words with any human being about the ordinance against pigs. That afternoon, she took a fishing pole from under her house and drove the old sow and the nine shoats down to Herb Mallory’s, on the outside of town. They were his, she said, if he wanted them, and he could pay her at killing time.

  It was literally true that Aunt Munsie never again exchanged words with anyone about the ordinance against pigs or about the conspiracy she had discovered against herself. But her daughter Lucrecie had a tale to tell about what Aunt Munsie did that afternoon after she had seen the constable and before she drove the pigs over to Herb Mallory’s. It was mostly a tale of what Aunt Munsie said to her pigs and to her dogs and her chickens.

  Crecie was in her own back yard washing her hair when her mama came down the rickety porch steps and into the yard next door. Crecie had her head in the pot of suds, and so she couldn’t look up, but she knew by the way Mama flew down the steps that there was trouble. “She come down them steps like she was wasp-nest bit, or like some young’on who’s got hisself wasp-nest bit—and her all of eighty, I reckon!” Then, as Crecie told it, her mama scurried around in the yard for a minute or so like she thought Judgment was about to catch up with her, and pretty soon she commenced slamming at something. Crecie wrapped a towel about her soapy head, squatted low, and edged over toward the plank fence. She peered between the planks and saw what her mama was up to. Since there never had been a gate to the fence around the pigsty, Mama had taken the wood ax and was knocking a hole in it. But directly, just after Crecie had taken her place by the plank fence, her mama had left off her slamming at the sty and turned about so quickly and so exactly toward Crecie that Crecie thought the poor, blind old soul had managed to spy her squatting there. Right away, though, Crecie realized it was not her that Mama was staring at. She saw that all Aunt Munsie’s chickens and those three dogs of hers had come up behind her, and were all clucking and whining to know why she didn’t stop that infernal racket and put out some feed for them.

  Crecie’s mama set one hand on her hip and rested the ax on the ground. “Just look at yuh!” she said, and then she let the chickens and the dogs—and the pigs, too—have it. She told them what a miserable bunch of creatures they were, and asked them what right they had to always be looking for handouts from her. She sounded like the boss-man who’s caught all his pickers laying off before sundown, and she sounded, too, like the preacher giving his sinners Hail Columbia at camp meeting. Finally, shouting at the top of her voice and swinging the ax wide and broad above their heads, she sent the dogs howling under the house and the chickens scattering in every direction. “Now, g’wine! G’wine widja!” she shouted after them. Only the collie pup, of the three dogs, didn’t scamper to the farthest corner underneath the house. He stopped under the porch steps, and not two seconds later he was poking his long head out again and showing the whites of his doleful brown eyes. Crecie’s mama took a step toward him and then she halted. “You want to know what’s the commotion about? I reckoned you would,” she said with profound contempt, as though the collie were a more reasonable soul than the other animals, and as though there were nothing she held in such thorough disrespect as reason. “I tell you what the commotion’s about,” she said. “They ain’t comin’ back. They ain’t never comin’ back. They ain’t never had no notion of comin’ back.” She turned her head to one side, and the only explanation Crecie could find for her mama’s next words was that that collie pup did look so much like Miss Lucille Satterfield.

  “Why don’t I go down to Memphis or up to Nashville and see ’em sometime, like you does?” Aunt Munsie asked the collie. “I tell you why. Becaze I ain’t nothin’ to ’em in Memphis, and they ain’t nothin’ to me in Nashville. You can go!” she said, advancing and shaking the big ax at the dog. “A collie dog’s a collie dog anywhar. But Aunt Munsie, she
’s just their Aunt Munsie here in Thornton. I got mind enough to see that.” The collie slowly pulled his head back under the steps, and Aunt Munsie watched for a minute to see if he would show himself again. When he didn’t, she went and jerked the fishing pole out from under the house and headed toward the pigsty. Crecie remained squatting beside the fence until her mama and the pigs were out in the street and on their way to Herb Mallory’s.

  That was the end of Aunt Munsie’s keeping pigs and the end of her daily rounds with her slop wagon, but it was not the end of Aunt Munsie. She lived on for nearly twenty years after that, till long after Lucrecie had been put away, in fine style, by the Blalocks. Ever afterward, though, Aunt Munsie seemed different to people. They said she softened, and everybody said it was a change for the better. She would take paper money from under her carpet, or out of the chinks in her walls, and buy things for up at the church, or buy her own whiskey when she got sick, instead of making somebody bring her a nip. On the square she would laugh and holler with the white folks the way they liked her to and the way Crecie and all the other old-timers did, and she even took to tying a bandanna about her head—took to talking old-nigger foolishness, too, about the Bell Witch, and claiming she remembered the day General N. B. Forrest rode into town and saved all the cotton from the Yankees at the depot. When Mr. Will and Mr. Thad came to see her with their families, she got so she would reminisce with them about their daddy and tease them about all the silly little things they had done when they were growing up: “Mr. Thad—him still in kilts, too—he says, ‘Aunt Munsie, reach down in yo’ stockin’ and git me a copper cent. I want some store candy.’ ” She told them about how Miss Yola Ewing, the sewing woman, heard her threatening to bust Will’s back wide open when he broke the lamp chimney, and how Miss Yola went to the Doctor and told him he ought to run Aunt Munsie off. Then Aunt Munsie and the Doctor had had a big laugh about it out in the kitchen, and Miss Yola must have eavesdropped on them, because she left without finishing the girls’ Easter dresses.

  Indeed, these visits from Mr. Thad and Mr. Will continued as long as Aunt Munsie lived, but she never asked them any more about when they were sure enough coming back. And the children, though she hugged them more than ever—and, toward the last, there were the children’s children to be hugged—never again set foot in her back yard. Aunt Munsie lived on for nearly twenty years, and when they finally buried her, they put on her tombstone that she was aged one hundred years, though nobody knew how old she was. There was no record of when she was born. All anyone knew was that in her last years she had said she was a girl helping about the big house when freedom came. That would have made her probably about twelve years old in 1865, according to her statements and depictions. But all agreed that in her extreme old age Aunt Munsie, like other old darkies, was not very reliable about dates and such things. Her spirit softened, even her voice lost some of the rasping quality that it had always had, and in general she became not very reliable about facts.

  Bad Dreams

  THE OLD Negro man had come from somewhere in West Tennessee, though certainly not from the Tollivers’ hometown. Mr. James Tolliver had simply run across him in downtown St. Louis and had become obligated or attached to him somehow. For two or three years, Mr. James had kept him as a hand around his office there, no doubt believing every day he would discover some real use for him. Then one evening, without a word to his wife or to anybody else, he brought the old fellow home with him and installed him in an empty room above the garage.

  Actually, this was likely to make little difference to Mrs. James Tolliver, whom everybody called Miss Amy. It would concern Miss Amy hardly at all, since the old fellow was clearly not the house-servant type. He might do for a janitor (which was Mr. James’s plan) or even a yardman (under Mr. James’s close supervision), and he could undoubtedly pick up odd jobs in the neighborhood. But his tenure of the room above the garage was bound to go almost unnoticed by Miss Amy and by her three half-grown sons and two elderly female relatives. They would hardly know he was on the place. They hardly knew the room he would occupy was on the place. Yet during the first few minutes after his arrival the old Negro must have supposed that Miss Amy was a nervous and exacting fussbudget and that every member of the family had a claim on that unoccupied servant’s room above the garage.

  The Tollivers’ garage, having been designed originally as a carriage house and stable, was of remarkable amplitude. When the Tollivers’ two Lincolns were in their places at night, there was space enough for two more cars of the same wonderful length and breadth. And on the second floor, under the high mansard roof, the stairway opened onto an enormous room, or area, known as the loft room, in one end of which there was still a gaping hay chute, and from the opposite end of which opened three servant’s rooms. The Tollivers’ housemaid, Emmaline, and her husband, Bert, shared with their infant daughter a suite of two rooms and bath. The third room had been unoccupied for several years and was furnished only with an iron bedstead and a three-legged chest of drawers.

  It happened that Emmaline was in her quarters on that late afternoon in October when Mr. James arrived with the old Negro. Her husband, who was houseboy and butler, was in the house setting the table for dinner, and she herself had just hurried out for one reassuring glance at their four-month-old baby, for whom they had not yet agreed upon a name. When the sounds of Mr. James’s car reached her ears, Emmaline was in the room with the sleeping baby. She had no idea that anything unusual was astir, but at the first sound of the Lincoln motor she began moving away from the baby bed and toward the door to the loft room. It was almost dark, but, craning her neck and squinting her eyes, she gave a last loving and protective look toward the dark little object in its cagelike bed. Then she went out, closing the door behind her. She had taken only two steps across the rough flooring of the wide, unlighted loft room when she saw Mr. James ascending the stairs, followed by an old Negro man whom she had never seen before.

  The Negro man halted at the top of the steps to get his breath, and, catching the sight of Emmaline, he abruptly jerked the tattered felt hat from his head. Emmaline, at the same moment, commenced striding with quickened step toward him and Mr. James.

  “Is that somebody you aim to put up out here, Mr. James?” she asked in a loud and contentious whisper as she approached the two men.

  “Is there no electric light in this room?” Mr. James said sternly.

  He had heard Emmaline’s question distinctly enough, and she knew that he was not pretending he had not. Mr. James was, after all, Emmaline and Bert’s landlord, the master of the house where they worked, and a Tolliver of the preeminent Tolliver family of Thornton, Tennessee, where she and Bert were born, and this was merely his way of saying that he did not desire to have any conversation with her about the old fellow. But why didn’t he? What could it be, Emmaline asked herself. Then the truth about the whole situation came to her, and as she recognized the true picture of what was happening now and of what, indeed, had been happening for several months past, she began uttering a volley of objections that had no relation to any truth: Why, now, Mr. James ought to have given Miss Amy some warning of this, oughtn’t he? Miss Amy was going to be right upset, wasn’t she, being taken by surprise, with Mr. James’s moving somebody or other into her good storeroom where she was planning to put the porch furniture any week now? And besides, weren’t the two old aunts expecting some of their antiques sent up from Tennessee? And where else could the aunts store their antiques? And wasn’t it a shame, too, how crazy about playing in that room James, Jr., and little Landon always had been? Why, the room was half full of basketballs and bows and arrows and bowie knives this minute unless the boys had moved them this very day!

  She was addressing this collection of untruths not to Mr. James but frankly to the old Negro, who stood with his hat in one hand and a knotty bundle of clothes under the other arm. The old man gave no sign either that he recognized Emmaline’s hostility or that he really believed his moving in
would cause a great stir in the family. He stood at the top of the steps gazing with respect at the great, dark, unceiled loft room, as though it might be a chapel of some kind. So little, his manner seemed to say, such a one as he knew about even the loft rooms of the rich.

  Mr. James, in the meantime, was walking heavily across the floor in the direction of the empty servant’s room. Suddenly Emmaline turned and ran on tiptoe after him. “Mr. James!” she whispered rather frantically.

  Mr. James stopped and did a soldierly about-face. “Emmaline,” he said, “I want some light in this place.”

  In a single moment, total darkness seemed to have overcome the loft room. And at that same moment came the waking cry of Bert and Emmaline’s baby. With her next step Emmaline abandoned her tiptoeing and began stabbing the floor with her high heels. As she passed Mr. James, she reached one arm into the empty room to switch on a light and said, “Now that’s what I been afraid of—that we would go and wake that baby of mine before I help Bert serve supper.”

  “In here,” Mr. James said to the old Negro, and gestured toward the room. “And we’ll have you a stove of some sort before winter sets in.”

  The weak light from inside the bedroom doorway only made the wide loft room seem darker. Mr. James remained completely beyond the reach of the light. “Is there no electrical outlet in this loft room, Emmaline?” he said.

  The baby had set up a steady, angry wailing now. “No, sir,” Emmaline replied softly.

  “In here,” Mr. James’s voice repeated. This time the words came plainly as an order for the old man to advance. At once there was the sound of the old man’s shambling across the rough flooring, and presently there was the sound of Mr. James’s heavy footsteps as he went off toward the stairs. Somewhere in the darkness the two men passed each other, but Emmaline knew they made no communication as they passed. She heard Mr. James’s firm footsteps as he descended the dark stairs, but still she didn’t go to the baby, who was crying now in a less resentful manner. She waited by the open door until the old man came into the light.