Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  “How about black folks?”

  “Black folks ain’t as bad hypocrites as white folks. White folks want somebody for governor who pretends he’s a little better than they are. Black folks just want somebody that gets the job done, and don’t care so much whether he …”

  “… keeps his pants zipped up,” Bright finished for him.

  Flavo nodded, his jaw hard. “Yep.” He took another sip of the ice water, then put the glass down on the coffee table next to the newspaper.

  They sat there for a while staring at each other, and then Bright said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Hah! What can I do? Stick, that’s what. I’ve got no choice. We’ve got no choice.”

  “But if you did?”

  Flavo hung fire for a moment, and then his face softened. “I’d stick anyhow, I reckon. Little Fitz Birdsong may not be the greatest statesman who ever came down the pike, but his heart is in the right place, far as black folks is concerned. Unlike some I remember.”

  Bright started to protest that Fitz’s father’s heart had been in the right place too, he just never did much about it. And of course times were changed. Lots of black folks voted now, and that made white politicians sit up and take notice. But of course Flavo Richardson knew all that.

  “God knows, we don’t need Maurice Calhoun.” The name dripped from Flavo’s tongue like bile. “We need to get shet of what Maurice Calhoun stands for. So no, Flavo Richardson ain’t going to run out on Little Fitz Birdsong.”

  He is a calculating man, Bright thought, keen and cunning. She remembered him as a very small boy, sitting on the back steps of the Bascombe house across town while his mother, Hosanna, cooked and cleaned for Dorsey Bascombe and his family—quiet, deep inside himself, staring out across the backyard for hours at a time. No bother to anybody, just sitting there thinking, the small dark eyes blinking with some inner rhythm. She never asked him back then what he was thinking. It would never occur to a young white girl that a small black boy had any thoughts worth asking about. And it would never cross the mind of a small black boy to volunteer any. It was not until years later that Bright discovered that Flavo Richardson had not been contemplating june bugs or wild onions there on her back steps. She had never really paid much attention to Flavo until the day he rowed up onto her front porch in 1939.

  “You rescued Fitz from the Flood,” Bright said now.

  A bit of a smile flickered across Flavo’s face. “Yes. I did that.”

  “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

  “Drowned, prob’ly.” Flavo stood stiffly, grimacing. A touch of arthritis in his back added to his stoop and his irritability these days. “Well, I’m gonna do what I can to rescue him again, Bright. That is, if the boat ain’t sprung too bad a leak.”

  She picked up the newspaper from the coffee table, took a last look at it, handed it back to Flavo.

  “Keep it if you want,” he said.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I think I’ve seen quite enough, thank you.”

  He shrugged, tucked the paper under his arm. She followed him to the door, but before he opened it, he turned to her again. “And you, Bright. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Me?”

  “He’s your boy.”

  “Well, it’s not my fight.”

  “Hmmmm.” He tilted his head up, looked at her down the bridge of his nose. “You done gone to seed, Bright?”

  “No,” she snapped. “I just mind my own business.”

  “Times past, you minded lots of folks’ business. Made some folks mad, made some folks think you were something special.” He opened the screen door, stepped out onto the porch.

  “I’ve done my bit,” she said firmly. “As the old song says, I have laid down my burden down by the riverside, and I ain’t gonna study war no more.”

  Flavo frowned, a deep furrow creasing his brow. “War don’t never end, Bright. Battles do, but war don’t. You can sit here in this old house and ignore it if you want. But don’t talk to me about laying down no burden.”

  Bright opened her mouth to say something mean and spiteful. Mind your own business! Who do you think you are? But no. That would not do for a good number of reasons. Chiefly, this stooped old man, still full of combativeness, was part of her history—a strong black link to her childhood. And there was precious little of that left anymore. So instead she said quietly, “Are you going to call him?”

  “Of course.”

  Bright nodded. “When you do, tell him to call his mama.”

  “Yes. I’ll do that.” And he closed the screen softly between them and was gone into the morning, leaving her standing there in the quiet of the house, drained and weary.

  There was of course nothing she could do. Was there? Hear him out, perhaps, provide a little comfort. Avoid judgment. But Fitz Birdsong was a big boy now, capable of making his own messes and cleaning them up. Like the rest, he was no longer her responsibility. Damn Flavo Richardson for trying to make her think he was.

  >

  No sooner had Flavo gone, taking his newspaper with him, than the phone began to ring. It was as if he had come as the town’s emissary, bearing bad tidings, and thus opened the subject for everybody else’s two cents’ worth.

  Bright let the phone ring for a long time before she finally picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

  “Shall I come over?” Xuripha Deloach. Plump, powdered Xuripha. Cheerful purveyor of bad news from the sunroom of her white-columned house on the bluff across the river. Newspaper spread across the brass and glass coffee table while she clucked over the hideous picture of Fitz and Drucilla Luckworst.

  “Come over?” Bright asked. “For what?”

  A huge, bosom-expanding intake of breath on the other end. “Have you seen the paper?”

  “Oh, my God,” Bright said. “I’ll bet the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor again. Fitzhugh was always afraid of that.”

  “No. Little Fitz.”

  “Little Fitz has bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  “Worse than that!” Then softly, sadly: “It appears he has stuck his foot in it, Bright.”

  “Stuck his foot in what?”

  “Come to think of it,” Xuripha said, “it wasn’t his foot at all.”

  “Let’s start over,” Bright said. She knew she was being perverse, but there was something about Xuripha that could summon perversity. They had been friends since childhood in the way two women who live together in the same small town all their lives will of necessity carry on a friendship of one sort or another. But it was a friendship edged by rivalry, and Xuripha had always felt the rivalry much more keenly than Bright. Bright realized that Xuripha had simply never gotten over the fact that Bright had won, at least in those things which truly mattered to Xuripha. Bright had married the handsome and successful Fitzhugh Birdsong. And Xuripha had settled for Hubert Deloach, a young man so homely that people called him Monkey. To his face. Only in recent years had Xuripha begun to gain what she perceived to be the upper hand as Bright was widowed and, in effect, retired. Monkey Deloach had proven to be an exceptionally astute businessman. He had made a good deal of money from what had once been Bright’s father’s lumber business. And Xuripha had become the town’s reigning matron—social arbiter, giver to worthy causes, theological conscience of the Baptist Church, five-time president of the Study Club. She worked tirelessly at it, exerting an iron-willed influence and fending off the younger women who nipped at her heels. But despite all that, the past rankled. Even now, Bright imagined, Xuripha took some exquisite satisfaction in a bit of scandal involving a Birdsong. Perversity on both their parts.

  “Let’s start over,” Bright said now. “There’s something in the paper about Fitz?”

  “Lord God Almighty!” Xuripha exploded.

  “Read it to me,” Bright said. “I don’t take the paper.”

  “Well, there’s an enormous photograph …,” she began. Bright put the telephone receiver down
softly on the table and went to the kitchen to retrieve her breakfast. By now, the raisin bran was soggy and the milk lukewarm, but the banana slices were still firm. Bright could not abide soft, overripe bananas. She liked to buy them fresh, even a tad green, two or three at a time. This was the last one in the house. She took the cereal back to the telephone table and took her time eating it, listening abstractedly to the unintelligible buzz of Xuripha’s voice. When she had finished, she took a pad and pencil from the drawer underneath the phone and wrote down “bananas.” Then she took the empty cereal bowl back to the kitchen. As she finally picked up the telephone receiver again, Xuripha was reading, “ ‘ … reported huddling behind closed doors with his political advisers through the day Sunday …’ ”

  “Merciful heavens!” Bright cried. “No more! I feel faint!”

  “I’ll be right there …”

  “No! It’s a private agony!”

  There was a long moment of silence. Then Xuripha said firmly, “He’s been framed, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “A hussy and a couple of newspapermen,” she snorted. “Birds of a feather. And Maurice Calhoun. He’d drive over a carload of nuns to get elected.”

  Bright smiled. That was the thing about Xuripha Deloach. There was, at the bottom of the rivalry, the friendship—strange, perhaps, but long-suffering. Only over a long time spent in one place could such an accommodation come about. As Dorsey Bascombe had liked to say, it is pretty hard to stay mad at a man when you have to look him in the eye day after day. You make do with each other, warts and foibles and all. So for Bright Birdsong and Xuripha Deloach, the friendship transcended the other, at least at the moments when it counted. And at this particular moment, there was Little Fitz Birdsong, a local boy and Bright Birdsong’s son. And damn the man or woman who attempted to blacken his name, rightly or wrongly. So there.

  “Has he called?” Xuripha asked now.

  “No,” Bright confessed. “He may be trying just this minute.”

  “Are you sure I shouldn’t come over?”

  “No. Truly.”

  “Take two aspirin. I’ll call back.”

  “Yes. ‘Bye now.” Bright hung up and sat there for a moment. Then the telephone rang again.

  “Bright?” Henry Wimsley, the Methodist minister.

  “Yes, Henry.”

  “The paper …”

  “I know.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I can’t think of a thing, Henry.”

  “Has Fitz called yet?”

  “Not a word.”

  “I guess he’s busy.” Henry was trying to sound hopeful, she knew, but it came out wrong. Busy. Yes, he must be up to his keister in alligators about now.

  “Um-hum, I imagine he is.”

  “Well, should I lead us in prayer?”

  “It’s sweet of you to offer, Henry, but somehow I have a hard time with the notion of praying on the telephone, like we were asking God to eavesdrop.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Well, I’ll just say a prayer here in my study.”

  “Thank you, Henry.”

  The telephone rang again almost the instant she put the receiver back in the cradle. She jerked her hand away, startled, sat staring at it for a good long moment. It rang and rang. She thought not to answer. Go away and let me be quiet and think about this thing! Then she snatched it up.

  A thick, harsh voice on the other end. “You tell that boy of yores to stop dippin’ his wick—“

  Bright slammed the receiver down, waited an instant, picked it up again, heard a dial tone, dropped the receiver with a clatter on the table. That would be quite enough of that business.

  Bright sat there, stunned and confused. Then she got up quickly, went to the door and stood looking out at the porch, half expecting Little Fitz Birdsong’s big black limousine to wheel into the driveway and Fitz to jump out with his big warm smile enveloping her like new sun. “It’s all right, Mama! All a mistake! No sweat!” But no, the driveway was empty and the morning clanked and clamored at her, all raucousness and discord now—the traffic rumbling by on Birdsong, a stock boy banging about at the Dixie Vittles loading dock, the whine of machinery down the block at the rear of Big Deal O’Neill’s Ford dealership, a man standing in the doorway of the Western Auto on the other side of the street, hollering something unintelligible to someone unseen in a pickup truck parked at the curb.

  The morning assaulted her ears and her sensibilities. Bright stood there a moment longer and then retreated in confusion to the piano, an old refuge. She began to play mindlessly, hands wandering about the keyboard with a life of their own, unheard. After a while, she began to hear what they played, the old familiar melody at last beginning to break through the babble. Schumann’s Träumerei. It was the most beautiful piece of music she knew, and she could still play it with a lovely grace, the way she had done fifty years before at the Atlanta Conservatory of Music competition, the day she had met Fitzhugh Birdsong. Afterward, the slim young man had introduced himself and said, “Miss Bascombe, you made me cry.” And she had believed him.

  Bright had always insisted that her own piano students, at a certain stage in their development, learn the Träumerei. She stuck to it over the years as her classes dwindled until there were just a handful now, mostly children of former students who remembered fondly the soft afternoons in Bright Birdsong’s parlor with the metronome clicking its discipline and small fingers coaxing notes from the upright console Story and Clark piano; who remembered the day when Bright turned off the metronome and opened the piano bench and spread the pages of Schumann’s Träumerei across the stand and said, “I believe you’re ready for this.” For those few, it would be a magic moment.

  She played it now, hearing—as she always did—the mellow ghost of Dorsey Bascombe’s trombone floating above the piano, matching note for note. “A trombone,” Dorsey Bascombe had said, “is the sound of God’s breathing.” A lost duet, so unspeakably beautiful and sad it made Bright Birdsong’s heart ache. She played on, seeing Dorsey standing beside her piano in the choir loft in the Methodist Church on a warm summer’s Sunday night, eyes closed and fingers poised lightly on the gliding slide of the trombone. They played, now as then, in perfect unison. And when the last note had taken wing through the window into the June morning, she lifted her hands from the keyboard and placed them gently in her lap and sat there quietly.

  She waited for the return of tranquillity. But instead, she heard a small voice inside her brain asking, “What on earth now?”

  3

  The bleating of the Winnebago’s horn startled her, and she rose from the piano bench and went to the front door in time to see the van turn the corner onto Birdsong Boulevard and then lumber into her driveway like a huge amiable beast, the spreading branches of the pecan trees scraping along its top with a screech. She could see Roseann in the passenger seat, her son-in-law, Rupert, behind the wheel, pipe clamped in his teeth, Jimbo’s small head peering between them. Bright stepped onto the porch as the Winnebago wheezed to a halt and Roseann jerked the window open.

  She was holding a newspaper in her right hand, waving it. “Did you see it? Did you see what he did?”

  Bright could feel her stomach knotting, the old dread taking hold. Roseann had always been a tattletale, never happier than when she was delivering some piece of bad news about her brother, the worse the better. She thrived on crisis, and if she didn’t have one ready-made, she would resort to invention. Who else but a woman looking for trouble would marry a professional golfer whose eye wandered farther than his tee shots? Not Rupert; Rupert was the second—a solid, plodding man, totally unlike the golfer, whose name Bright was already having trouble remembering.

  Roseann flung open the door of the Winnebago and leapt out, her shoes making tiny explosions in the sand of the driveway as she marched toward the steps, still waving the paper. “All over the front page!” she cried. Roseann’s hair, already streaked with gray at thirty-six, was d
isheveled, galloping off in all directions. She still plucked at her hair. She had done it as a child, pulling and tugging at the fine brown strands until Bright finally cut it in exasperation to a short bob. It had been a mistake. Roseann fretted and fumed until there was a wildness in her eyes and her asthma flared up, racking her frail body with fierce coughing fits. Her fingers danced about her head, even in sleep. Bright let the hair grow back, but it scarcely made Roseann less difficult, then or now.

  Bright met her at the bottom of the steps. “Roseann, it’s good to see you,” she said. She reached out, brushing past the newspaper, and hugged her daughter. She could see Rupert still in the front seat of the Winnebago, tidying up. Rupert was a tidy man. She wondered for a brief moment if he was miserable yet, if Roseann had driven him to distraction. Roseann was obsessively neat, but not tidy in the comfortable way Rupert was.

  Roseann gave her a quick squeeze, then stepped back and thrust the newspaper out again. “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it.”

  “Well?” Roseann demanded.

  Bright glanced down at the photograph, the startled man in boxer shorts and the bored woman in the robe, frozen in black and white. “Fitz is getting a little paunch, don’t you think? All that rich food at these political do’s. Your father never had to worry about that. The Birdsongs could always eat until their eyes bulged out and never gain an ounce. Fitz takes after the Bascombes in that regard, I’m afraid. I had an uncle …”

  “Mother!”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Well, it’s wretched.” She waved the paper again. “How could he do it?”

  “How do you know he did it?”

  “It’s right there”—Roseann poked the photograph with her finger—“in black and white.”

  “Don’t be too quick to judge, Roseann. You know politics.”

  “No.” She shook her head angrily. “I don’t know politics. I never did know politics. I hate politics.”

  And that was the truth, Bright thought. Fitzhugh Birdsong had always been the one who could manage Roseann. She would sit calmly in his lap for hours while he read or talked to her. Nights when he was home from Washington they would sit together in a wicker rocking chair on the front porch while the evening grew soft and velvet around them, while the town grew still, and Bright could hear the faint rise and fall of their voices until finally Roseann would drift off to sleep in Fitzhugh’s arms. He might sit there for another hour, rocking her, until he finally rose and took her gently to bed. But those nights were so few, so preciously few. Yes, Roseann must truly hate politics.