by Packer, Vin
Thad Hooper grabs his khaki pants from the bureau drawer and shakes them out. “White boys don’t do that to white girls, now, and you know it well as I. It’s instinct to get a nigger girl on the ground. Pure instinct. They grow out of it, and you know it. It’s a stage they pass through. Then little nigger girls just ask for it.”
Vivian sighs. “That’s just fine! Just ignore it? So long as Emily doesn’t have to see it, just ignore it! Well, Thad, I don’t think little Thad even knows what he’s doing; nigger girl or white child; and he does have a sister, Thad, whom he’s around plenty. The same as he’s around Marilyn Monroe Post!”
About to step into the khakis, Thad stops. He holds them in his hand and stares at his wife; with big, round, shocked eyes. “What the heck in Jesus are you saying, Vivian?” He walks over to her. “What the heck in Jesus!”
“Just that he ought to be told it’s wrong to do that to any girl. Thad, he’s a baby yet. He’s only nine!”
“No, I mean before that.”
“About Emily and him? Well, Thad, they share the same room, and — ”
“Is that what you think?” he says in a voice he makes incredulous.
“Is what what I think? That he’s getting curious? Yes!”
“And is what you think that he’d ever — ever — do anything to his little sister?”
“Well, Thad, you said yourself a few minutes ago that kids notice a lot more than folks think about members of the family. You said — ”
“You know something, Vivie?” Thad Hooper leans against the blue-flowered wallpaper and folds his arms across his chest; stands in his shorts; his white shirt; and his garters holding up his socks. “I think I’m going to allow you to join the Bigger Band. Play an instrument.”
She says, puzzled, “But I always wanted to. Why now?”
“Before, remember, Vivian, I said I thought blowing horns made womens’ busts get too blowy-looking. Too top-heavy. Well, blowing horns do do that, but I’ve got half a mind to let you anyway. Vivian, you know I think you’re dwelling on yourself too much, thinking too much, or being around by yourself. I come home and find you lying naked on the bed and all.”
“I wasn’t naked!”
“And then you get that funny way you get sometimes.”
“What way?” Vivian Hooper’s face takes a red color.
“You know what way. Sort of squirmy and wiggly, like you couldn’t wait. Like love didn’t have anything to do with it.”
‘Thad, please! I don’t know what you’re angry at, but please!”
“You know full well! I come home and find you naked on the bed and then I find out you’re feeling that funny way, and you get that injured air when I don’t indulge your way, and you know I just got back from Thelma’s grave. You know that. But that doesn’t stop you feeling funny, not even that. Like an animal!”
“Thad!”
“Yeah, Thad! But that didn’t stop you. What’d you think I’d be wanting to do on the anniversary of my twin’s death, hah? Did you think that? Was that why you had to get so nasty and make the remark about how she’s been dead too long to be mourned any more? Did that feeling make you say that?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No? I thought you did … And then the next thing you said is very interesting too, Mrs. Hooper. The next thing you went about suggesting was that little Thad was going to be doing dirty things to little Emily!”
“Oh, gaw, Thad! That’s not true!” Vivian Hooper shoves the rocker hard; walks away from it, so that it stays rocking in the center of the floor, while Thad remains leaning against the wall, watching her.
“As if to profane any brother and sister relationship there is, huh?” he says.
“I’m not going to stay here and listen to this, Thad.”
“I’m all through saying my piece, Vivian. You better think about it. Maybe a French horn’s what you need right about this point.”
Vivian Hooper starts for the door. “I’m going down and see how Hussie’s coming with the stew,” she says.
Thad Hooper reaches out and catches her arm; jerks her back.
“You’re not going out of this room in that Cellophane-thin bed gown!” he says. “You’re going to get yourself dressed before you go running around!”
She looks at his hand, wrapped around her wrist. She says quietly; crisply: “All right, Thad, let go of me so I can dress.”
He does and then goes to the rocker; stops its motion and sits down in it, starting its rocking again. He watches her.
Undoing the robe, Vivian Hooper hangs it in the closet. She reaches into a bureau drawer, takes from it a white satin garter belt, and slips it around her waist, tucking the elastic garters through her pants. She slips stockings over her feet and up her slim, long legs, fastening them to the garters, smoothing the seams. Then she pulls a white nylon slip over her head; and afterward, reaches for a cherry-colored cotton dress, which buttons in a row of infinitesimal pearls all the way down the front. Fixing herself in this, she slips her feet out of her white mules, and into heels.
He says nothing, but rocks in the chair, its slight squeak loud in the quiet room. Pausing to check her reflection in the full-length mirror and to touch her lips with a red stick and to powder her face, she runs a comb through her hair before she turns to leave the room, feigning complete ignorance of his presence there.
As her hand touches the knob, Thad Hooper says: “Vivian?” “What?” She does not look at him. “Turn around,” he says.
She turns and looks at him coldly.
“Come here, Vivian,” he says. His lips tip in the barest grin. “There’s a lot more to do than quarrel, Thad.” “Come here!”
“Thad, I don’t like the way you talk to me.” “Are you coming over here?” he says. “No, I am not.”
He says, “Oh, yes you are,” and getting up he takes three long steps to her, jerks her arm, and brings her back to the center of the room.
“Thad — ”
“What’d you put your clothes on for?” “You said to, didn’t you?” “Now I say not to.” “Thad, listen — ”
“You listen,” he says. “You listen to me! You get yourself undressed!”
While down in the kitchen, Hus sings:
“God knows they pierced him in the side
He never said a mumbalin’ word,
Not a word, not a word …”
And Major Post out on the hill kicks the kettle, cusses, grabs his toe, grimacing.
“You took your bloomers down,” Emily tells Marilyn Monroe Post.
“I knows that,” the child answers. “Doc James gave me a dip stick. You ain’t got any!”
• • •
While the pickers come from the fields.
“Hey, Claus Post, wait!” Little Thad calls to his playmate, running toward him, grinning, “Claus, wait for me!”
Claus Post turns; begins to smile gladly, then remembers and says, “I can’t play with you no more, little Thad. Hus don’t want me to no more.”
“Huh?”
“No more, cause what you done to my sister.” “Huh?” Little Thad pauses halfway to his buddy; looks at him, stunned. “Huh?”
“No I cain’t. I got to go home.”
“What?”
“I cain’t and that’s the law, cause Hus say you dirty naughty boy!”
“You listen to me,” little Thad starts. “You listen to me. You. You. You nigger!” little Thad shouts, and stands there shouting it. “Pick up that goddam frame of yours and tote it where it’s going.”
Claus Post begins to run.
“Nigger!” little Thad raves. “Bitch! Bitch! You ovenbelly bitch!”
• • •
Up the road, Bryan Post, heading for the pickup he’s got to fetch his kin from up North in; the pickup he’s going to borrow up at Hooper’s house.
• • •
While in their room Thad seeks the adjacent flesh, and she yields to him in a sigh that is his name.
10
Millard stares out the plane window of the immense expanse of white sky, and then shifts restlessly in his seat, bored and tired of sitting still silently.
Beside him the large man reads a copy of True, turning the pages noisily; sighing from time to time in an impatient sound; and trying to catch the eye of the hostess by wagging his finger toward the cockpit, near where she stands. Finally he reaches across Millard and punches a bell with his thumb — three quick jabs.
“Does that call her?” Millard asks. The man ignores the question, and resumes reading. Shrugging his shoulders, Millard pretends to whistle some melody softly and glances down at the postcard he is attempitng to write to Toe-In, and lifts his pencil. Under how’s it hanging, Millard prints: The poor bastard riding next to me has the shit scared out of him. Crazy! Man, Crazy!
“I’m sorry, sir,” the hostess says apologetically, candy-toned and smiling at the man. “I’m going to bring your lunch right away.”
“Look,” he drawls, “aren’t there any other seats in the back of this plane?”
“I’m sorry, sir. We’re filled to capacity.”
“This is really something, I’ll tell you!” he says. “This really is!”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
She smiles again and goes back down the aisle, and Millard glances at the man. His face is all red; poor sucker, Millard thinks. Then, seeing the pillow squeezed in the pocket of the seat in front of him, Millard grabs it.
“Here” he says, pushing it at the man.
The man looks startled. “What the hell is this!” he bellows indignantly.
“For your lap,” Millard answers. “To put your tray on when it comes.” He smiles at the man. “It’ll make it easier for you.”
For a moment the man stares at Millard; his eyes derogatory. Millard looks back at him, puzzled.
Then in a swift and violent movement of his big body, the man sweeps the pillow to the floor and kicks it over in front of Millard’s feet. And in some fast and hotly trapped flash of thinking, Millard’s mind says, You big fat sloppy jew-kike; you goddam yid, you — you — before words stop coming to his brain. The hands that offered the man the pillow slide under Millard, and he sits on them numbly, turning his head toward a sky that is suddenly unbelievably all white.
11
LATE that afternoon, driving back from the site of one of the captured stills, Colonel Pirkle half-consciously composes the lead he intends to use in his write-up of the bootleg crackdown for the Herald: This morning the country jail yard in Paradise looked as if the sheriff had gone into the used car and taxi business….
It did too. There were six taxicabs, two trucks, and five private cars lined up in the yard. Chuckling a little as he remembers the scene, Colonel nonetheless stays staunch in his belief that there has been altogether too much laxity on the part of the courts in the moonshine drive. Despite the fact that the law did manage to confiscate and impound the machines transporting the “shine,” and to arrest fifteen men and one woman involved in selling, transporting and possessing it, Colonel, as well as everyone in Paradise, knows that before the ink is dry on the bonds posted the defendants will be back in business. That is one reason he had driven out to see the still; to check first-hand on how effectively the agent had destroyed it, and to confirm his conviction that the agents had done a thorough job, and that it was not they who were responsible for the perpetual recurrence of bootlegging in the county, but some of Paradise’s own law-enforcing citizens. That really made Colonel angry.
Colonel is a medium-sized, solid-looking man in his early forties; a man who keeps Horace Greley’s quotation about the function of a newspaper Scotch-taped to his desk blotter:
THE BEST USE OF A JOURNAL IS TO PRINT THE LARGEST PRACTICAL AMOUNT OF IMPORTANT TRUTH — TRUTH WHICH TENDS TO MAKE MANKIND WISER, AND THUS HAPPIER —
Beside this there is a picture of Dix and Suzie taken outside the Methodist Church right after Joh had married them; a photograph of Ada taken the very afternoon she had surprised him by coming down from Athens and announcing she’d marry him if they’d elope immediately.
Resting on top of the blotter is one of Dickie’s baby shoes, which Colonel had sent off to Atlanta to have dipped in bronze and made into an ashtray….
Colonel drives slowly in the dusk, drinking in the sights and smells of the country surrounding Paradise, seeing not the drab and dreary look of the landscape as a whole, with its red dusty roads and unpainted shacks, from which television antennaes protrude, its gray houses with overgrown lawns where broken rockers rest to be rained on, and its worn-out barren poor look. Colonel sees singular things that spell home to him, and the approach of late fall — dying goldenrod, and sycamore leaves dancing in the dust a car makes, hay stacked in fields, cotton in fields and beside it the pickers who stay late still bent over the crops, and on the road now and then a truck filled with the cotton going to be ginned. At the crossroads he sees Hooper’s place, and turning off into town, he sees the colored school up on the hill.
Whenever he sees that school, he becomes irritated with young Dix for Dix’s support of Senator Henderson. Colonel and Dix don’t disagree on very many issues, but on this one they do. What surprises Colonel about it is that Dix has been back and forth to the colored school a few dozen times — even written up an interview with the James girl for the Herald; and made any number of speeches at the P.T.A. and Masons about the loathsome conditions.
“It’s going to stay that way as long as we got a fellow like Fred Henderson in,” Colonel had argued with Dix. “Now Fred’s a nice fellow, mind — I don’t have a thing against him. But he’s too busy worrying about the international situation. He’s putting fires out in houses across the street and his own house is on fire, Dix. You know the Nigraw school’s a filth pot!”
Dix said, “Sellers won’t do it any faster, Dad. The Negro school is up to us locally.”
“There’s where you’re wrong, Dix,” Coloned had insisted. “Now you know damn well there’s no one more in favor of states rights than Governor Tom Sellers. He speaks right out against segregation too! Fred don’t do that! No siree, Dix. Sellers will get things done in our state. He knows goddam well that if we don’t get to providing equal rights around here, we’re gonna have those Nigraws going to school right alongside the whites. And, Dix, that just ain’t fair to the Nigraws. It’d give ‘em all inferiority complexes, and stir up a whole whale of trouble. Now you know that!”
• • •
The colored school is a two-room shack set on the hill; heated in the cool months by two black potbellied stoves. Twenty-two years ago, in a flush of public enthusiasm, it was painted bright red, but since that time the weather has eaten away at the paint and on into the wood. Five years ago a citizens emergency committee headed by Bill Ficklin erected a new outhouse for the girls, because theirs had been swept away in a wind storm and they were using the same one as the boys.
“I don’t see what the hell difference it makes,” Doc Sell had argued at the town meeting when the proposal came up. “Them niggers ain’t shy about doing it in front of each other. They ain’t like us.”
Joh Greene had cinched the proposal by saying, “But we got to provide them with the chance to be like us. If they can’t, they can’t, but we got to give them equal chance. So I say put the outhouse in. If it’s never used, no one can say it’s because it isn’t there to be used!”
In his editorial supporting the outhouse proposal, Colonel had written: “It’s a step in the right direction, and there are still bigger steps to be taken. The colored school in Paradise stands up there on that neglected hill like a naked beggar-hag!” That’s why the school is called the Naked Hag.
“Well, anyhow,” Doc Sell had laughed when he read it, “can’t say that’s a hag without a pot to pee in.”
Driving down East Street with its rows of comfortable frame houses, with their lawns and dying flower beds looking bleak after the summer’s bloom, Colonel parks in fr
ont of his own two-story yellow frame house. As he goes up the sidewalk he notes with some irritation that the lights are on in every room; and remembers Ada’s insistence last month, “I don’t know how the electric bill grew to that size, Pirk. Must be the meter’s off kilter!”
Opening the door, tossing his cap on the straight-back chair in the hallway, Colonel calls, “Dix?”
He listens for an answer. Then he calls, “Ada?”
Walking back through the hallway and into the kitchen he sees Cindy, the maid, holding Dickie on her lap as she spoons strained spinach into his mouth.
“Hello, Cindy,” he says, walking over, removing his handkerchief from his pocket and bending to rub off a drool of the liquid from the baby’s chin. “Hi yah, Dickie-bird. Hey, boo! You’re drooling!”
“Ain’t gonna do no good whiping it off, Mr. Pirkle, sir. He just gonna drool more.”
Cindy is a tall, skinny Negro in her twenties, a pretty, lazy-looking girl with a beanpole shape and an almost too placid disposition. Often her complacency irritates Colonel, as it does now when she answers his question: “Cindy, where’s Mrs. Pirkle?”
“I guess she’s upstairs.”
“What do you mean, you guess, Cindy? Is she or isn’t she?” “Was the last time I looked, Mr. Colonel.” “Did she tell you to feed Dickie?”
“I reckon I don’t have to be told no more,” Cindy answers, heaving a long sigh. “Dix isn’t home?”
“No, sir, Mr. Colonel. He ain’t come in all afternoon.” “Well, what are all the lights doing on?” Colonel snaps impatiently.
“I guess they was left on, Mr. Colonel.”
“Well, I guess they’d better be left off, Cindy! I’m not a millionaire who can afford to be paying thirty-dollar light bills every month.”
“Yes sir.”
“When there’s no one in the room, the lights should be out.” “Yes sir, Mr. Colonel.”
“I’ll see you at bath time, Dickie-bird,” Colonel says to the baby. “I’ll bathe him tonight, Cindy.”