Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  “Go home,” she said. His face fell and his shoulders slumped. “But come back when you’ve taken care of the sawmill and the bank.”

  His jaw dropped open, then he straightened, ran his hand through his hair, combing out the bit of hedge. “I’ll always take care of you, I promise that,” he said. He had a strong vibrant voice, the kind that bade men do what he said. The kind of voice you could put stock in.

  “I believe you will,” she said. Then she turned from the window and climbed back into bed. She lay there for a long moment, listening to the pounding of her heart, wondering what strange thing she had set in motion, then smiling as she heard Dorsey thrashing about again in the high hedge.

  “Tell me about the hedge,” Bright would cry as a small child, and they would tell her the story over and over, Dorsey’s eyes bright with the memory of it, adding details, embellishing the tale, Elise crossing her hands primly in her lap, her face scrunched with earnestness, taking a deep breath, “Now let me see …,” until Bright knew by heart how each of them had looked and exactly what they had said and thought there in the sweltering New Orleans afternoon, how Dorsey had gone home and straightened out his business and then returned to pay patient court to daughter and mother. All through the summer and fall, Dorsey journeyed back and forth until finally, by year’s end, he had worn them down. They married in the spring, and by summer, Elise was pregnant.

  “Bright,” Dorsey said the first time he laid eyes on the baby, when Dr. Finus Tillman brought the child from the upstairs bedroom where Elise had given birth. The doctor gave him a grunt and a curious look. When he filled out the birth certificate before he left the house, he entered the name Bright Bascombe in his neat hand, and Dorsey laughed when he saw it. “Yes,” he said. “I hadn’t meant it as a name, but it fits.”

  “Bright,” he repeated to Elise, who was groggy from childbirth, propped on a mound of pillows in the bed with the baby cradled in the crook of her arm. “That’s her name. She has your eyes and my optimism.” He sat gently on the bed and touched the baby’s smooth pink cheek with the tip of a finger. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “What?” She closed her eyes, drifting away from him.

  “The baby’s name. Bright.”

  “Ummmm.”

  Hosanna was hovering nearby, and as she reached to take the baby she said, “You give a young’un an uncommon name, you better make shore it’s an uncommon young’un.”

  “Yes,” Dorsey said. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  Hosanna gave him an arch look. “I ’speck you will.”

  By the time Elise awoke several hours later it was done, the certificate recorded at the courthouse. Elise protested: there were several perfectly good female names on both sides; the relatives would be put off by their having given an offspring a strange and undignified name such as Bright. But the protest was mild. In this as in most matters, Elise Bascombe allowed her husband to take care of things, as he had promised he would do.

  So, too, with the visits to the lumberyard that began when Bright was barely out of diapers. Dorsey brushed aside Elise’s concern and took Bright with him, and she grew up with the noise and smell and feel of the yard. Dorsey had only one rule: “Don’t go outside without me.” Bright never broke it. She sensed the gravity of it. She would stand for hours at the open window of the small lumberyard office, watching the teeming life outside, or play with a doll in the dark knee-hole of the big desk, while her father came and went, bringing the smell of sawdust and resin through the door when he entered, leaving a powerful resonance behind when he departed.

  She went in the early morning and stayed until lunchtime. Just before the noon hour, Dorsey would bustle in and hoist her on his shoulders and they would tour the yard, checking every facet of the operation as Dorsey’s long strides took them from one end to the other, his boots crunching softly in the thick matting of sawdust that covered everything. From the giddy height she could watch the sweating mill hands wrestling with the lumber-laden wagons, checking them as they came through the gate and noting the size of the load in rude cross-hatch arithmetic on a pad, unloading the rough boards and stacking them to dry. Then to the shed, where the giant saws of the planer mill shrieked and whined, first crosscutting the dried boards into eight- and ten-foot lengths, ripping them lengthwise into their proper dimensions. On by conveyor to the planer itself, where the boards disappeared into the whirling blades and emerged naked and white, smooth-cut on two sides, carried directly to a growing stack inside a gaping boxcar on the spur next to the mill. Bright Birdsong could see all of the world that was worth seeing from Dorsey’s shoulders, arms wrapped tightly around his head while he held his battered felt hat in one hand and pointed out things with the other.

  In the years of her early childhood, they were the only white people on the entire lot. It was backbreaking, dangerous work that only blacks would do. You could lose an arm or your life in the blink of an eye. But there was something primitively beautiful about the work and an intensely physical dignity about the way they did it, a powerful rhythm that seemed to flow from inside the wood into the heaving muscles of the mill hands. The black men shouted to Dorsey over the din, waved to Bright on her lofty perch, their own musty smell mingling with the rich aroma of the wood. They would end the tour at the big steam engine that powered the mill and Dorsey would pull his gold watch out of his pocket, flip open the cover, and, precisely at noon, he would nod to the man operating the steam engine, who would give a tug on the lanyard and let loose a blast from the steam whistle—whoooooo-whoot-whoooooooo. The air sang with its clear call and the lumberyard pulsated with vibrant life and Bright grew with it humming inside her like music.

  >

  Music … the first vivid memory of her mother. Notes, like fireflies, floating in the air above her bed, so close you could reach up and touch them, but so clean and sweet you only watched and listened for fear of damaging their tiny, delicate bodies.

  Dorsey had brought his bride home to a new two-story frame house on a quiet street two blocks from the business district, built with lumber from his mill. He had started construction immediately after returning from New Orleans the first time he had met Elise, smiling at friends’ suggestions that it was much too big for a bachelor. It was finished and furnished by the time he had won her hand, complete with a small music room on the side of the house next to the living room—a bright, airy place with large windows on three sides, kept open in the warm months to let the music drift outside. “My studio,” Elise called it. Dorsey had a Story and Clark upright piano shipped by train from Atlanta in a big wooden crate. It was just right for the narrow rectangular room, a tall, stately piano, dark mahogany, with a hinged lid over the keyboard and a bench to match with its own hinged seat that opened to reveal neat stacks of Elise’s sheet music.

  As a very small child, Bright would sit quietly in the big green overstuffed chair in the corner of the room, watching her mother play, fascinated by the way her long slim fingers made the fireflies dance at the right end of the keyboard, then coaxed the deep, somber bass notes from the other. The music vibrated deep inside her, the way the new sun filled her with warmth when she stood on the front porch on a clear early morning. Bright would watch for a long time, aching to be close to the music, and then Elise would turn and beckon with a smile and Bright would climb into her lap and sit, very still and quiet, while her mother played for a few moments more. And finally, Elise would give a nod and Bright would reach and put her small hands on the black and white keys and press them gently. Then, with Elise’s index finger guiding her own, she would tap out a simple melody, marveling at the sounds beneath the smooth ivory that floated out at her bidding. A magical thing it was, to make music one note at a time. Three blind mice … See how they run….

  It was not until much later, when she had become an accomplished pianist, that Bright realized that her mother’s playing was pleasant but quite ordinary. As a young girl, Elise had memorized Debussy’s Clair de Lu
ne for a recital before an audience of New Orleans grandees, who gave her a lovely ovation, and it remained her favorite and best piece, a bit of artistic refinement in what was otherwise a repertoire of popular songs of middling difficulty. But to Bright the child it was a wondrous gift to be able to summon such sounds from a piece of furniture; and to Dorsey Bascombe it was the essence of romance.

  “The first time I saw your mother, she was at the piano,” he told Bright, recounting how he had met Elise’s father, the cotton trader, at a New Orleans men’s club and had been invited home for dinner, how he stepped through the front door to the sight and sound of her, a wisp of a girl in a chiffon dress, seated at the Steinway grand in the living room, her long slender hands curved gracefully over the keyboard as she played “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.” Elise was partial to Stephen Foster. Dorsey Bascombe was smitten. “It was a delicious moment,” he said. “I knew at that instant what angels do in heaven. They play the piano.”

  The evenings of Bright’s childhood were filled with music. Dorsey would arrive late in the afternoon from the lumberyard, smelling of pine tar and wood shavings, give Elise and Bright a quick peck on the cheek, and retire to the upstairs bathroom to soak in the big white claw-footed tub (another evidence of Dorsey Bascombe’s progressiveness, indoor plumbing) while Bright hunkered in the hallway outside, listening to the splash of water and his slightly off-key baritone: “I’se coming, I’se coming, for my head is bending looooooow. I hear de gentle voices calling, Old Black Jooooooooe.“ Dorsey too was partial to Stephen Foster. Then after supper (they called it dinner in New Orleans, Elise said, but Dorsey insisted upon supper), with Bright bathed and nightgowned, they would gather in the music room off the parlor, where Dorsey would sit in the big green overstuffed chair with Bright nestled in his lap and Elise would play.

  In the warm months, with the windows open on three sides of the room, the notes from Elise Bascombe’s piano would mix and mingle with the music from the gathering night outside, the cricket symphonies and bird études, soft and delicate things. On the evenings when the windows had to be shut against cold or rain, her repertoire tended toward minor keys and plaintive popular melodies. But all of it she played with a light and pleasant touch, the notes floating above the piano like dandelion seeds, so that the chill or storm outside seemed unthreatening, only a bit sad and self-absorbed. Her only piece of any real spirit was “Yankee Doodle,” which she said was considered a bit unpatriotic back home in New Orleans. Whenever she launched into it, Dorsey would clasp Bright’s small hands in his and they would clap in time to the music while Bright cackled with laughter.

  No matter what the weather, at the end of a half-hour or so concert by Elise, Dorsey would rise from the chair, seat Bright deep in its cushions, kneel and open the long black leather case that always lay next to the chair, and remove his trombone from its velvet resting place. “The coffin,” he called it, even though it made Elise shudder. He would attach the slide to the body of the trombone, place a few drops of oil on the slide, working it up and down with a long flowing motion of his arm, then tune it while Elise tapped out an E-flat on the piano. “What shall it be tonight, my dear?” he would ask. It was always her choice, usually something with a nice, simple melody, and always a piece written in a key with flats so that it would be easy for Dorsey to transpose on his trombone. There were no duets for trombone and piano in the stacks of music beneath the hinged lid of the bench; he simply picked out the melody and played by ear. He had been introduced to the trombone by a local bandmaster when he was a boy and had fallen in love with it. “The trombone,” he said, “is the sound of God’s breathing.” He had a nice firm lip and good lungs and he could entice smooth, rounded tones from the instrument. The golden trombone seemed an extension of him as he stood by the piano, eyes closed, the slide gliding back and forth as they played. His favorite piece was Beethoven’s Klavierstück, written for Beethoven’s own Elise, his mystery woman. At the end of whatever they played, he would bend down and kiss Elise on the forehead and say, “Ah, lovely, my dear.” That was Bright’s signal to cry “Play it again.” And they would repeat their selection for the evening while Bright fell asleep deep in the pillows of the chair with the music falling about her like a shroud, tiny crystal notes from the piano and big round golden ones from the trombone. Sometimes she would wake in her bed far into the night, hearing the music swirling about in her head. Or perhaps, she thought, it was the sound of God breathing outside her window.

  >

  There was music, and then there was wisdom. Hosanna. The rise of the strong black voice over the kitchen stove as she prepares breakfast, indoctrinating the white child with her black notions, the tantalizing smell of them mingling with the aroma of grits and ham and perking coffee: “White girls ain’t s’pozed to be out in the broad-day sun. It sprockles the skin and makes ’em look trashy.”

  “What does sprockled mean, Hosanna?”

  “Hush, child, and listen to what I’m tellin’ you. Broad-day sun ain’t nothing but hot and wore out with hisself. Ain’t nothing but leftovers. Black folks ain’t got no choice but to be out in the broad-day sun ’cause black folks don’t get nothing but leftovers nohow.” Hiss … sizzle … a dollop of butter goes skittering across the smoking surface of the frying pan… “But what folks s’pozed to have is the new sun. He been down there hiding all night, storing up power, and then he peeks up and winks at you and then gives a big smile.” Gurgle … plop … tiny pockets of air rise from the depths of the grits boiler, bulging the surface and then erupting with puffs of steam … “New sun got power to heal and clean. That’s what yo’ mama needs, some new sun. That’s why she act strange sometimes. She needs to get up and get some new sun ‘stead of stayin’ in bed ’til midday.” Smack!… a plump brown hand wallops a yellow wad of biscuit dough against the floured kneading board…. “And that’s the truth, young’un.” It is more than truth. It is wisdom. She suspects that in some things, Hosanna Richardson is wiser than Dorsey Bascombe. He knows all there is to know about horses and trees. But if you asked him about the power of new sun, he would likely give you a strange look. Some things are best left to Hosanna.

  >

  Music and wisdom formed the strong, sure bedrock of Bright’s early childhood. It was mostly warmth and light, an airy goodness like fresh-risen biscuits.

  But there was also what Hosanna referred to darkly as “the baby bidness.” Bright understood little of it, only that it took her mother away from her for long periods of time when there was no music from the piano and a pall of nervous anticipation settled over the house. It was a cycle, like the seasons: Elise weak and nauseous, taking to her bed, Dr. Finus Tillman bustling in and out periodically, Dorsey pinch-faced and hopeful. Elise made infrequent trips downstairs, slow migrations with Dorsey’s strong arm around her; and Bright was allowed a daily visit to Elise’s room, where she propped herself beside her mother on two pillows while Elise read to her. But there was mostly quiet, heavy with the mystery of what was going on in the bedroom upstairs and by Bright’s notion, communicated unwittingly by the adults in the house, that if she asked too many questions, it would somehow disrupt the process. Inevitably, something did. There was a crisis—like a cold blast of winter—and everything was over: Dorsey stonily silent and sad, Elise pale and wasted against her pillows, barely able to raise her hand to Bright’s cheek, Hosanna wrapped in a deep funk of disapproval over the entire business. Bright took frightened refuge in the kitchen, where Hosanna explained just enough of it to keep her questions at bay, but not enough to satisfy her about the dark and mysterious details. The only thing she knew for sure was that, at some point, “the baby bidness” was over. There had been angry men’s voices in the hallway upstairs on a cold February evening and Bright had heard the unmistakable words from Dr. Tillman: “No more, Dorsey. Give it up, or you’ll kill her.” Then, the slamming of a door and Dr. Tillman, grim and smelling of camphor, had left the house carrying something in a
white porcelain pan covered with a piece of cloth. Hosanna stood at the bottom of the stairs, wiping her eyes with her apron. Bright lurked in the kitchen doorway nearby, trying to see and hear without being obtrusive. “Well, that’s the end of the baby bidness,” Hosanna said.

  “What did the doctor do to Mama?” Bright asked in a very small voice.

  Hosanna whirled on her, eyes flashing. “Curiosity killed the cat!” she barked, and stormed past Bright into the kitchen, leaving her alone and confused. She crept upstairs after a while to her own room and put herself to bed, drifting off to troubled sleep in a muddle of dreams about dead cats and too many questions. The next morning, Dorsey descended the stairs for breakfast cloaked in gloom and disappointment. There was something very close to anger naked on his face. Bright decided to keep her mouth shut and risk no more disaster.

  >

  It was five months after the end of “the baby bidness” when the woman appeared at the front door. She had a big brown mole protruding from her chin with two black hairs growing from it. Bright stared, fascinated, through the screen as the woman bent, peering into the gloom of the hallway at her. “I’ve come to see your mother,” she said.

  “Yes’m, Miz Elise’ll be right down,” Hosanna said, looming behind Bright. She reached around Bright to open the screen. “You just come on in, Miz Hardwicke. Just have a seat in here in the parlor and I’ll tell Miz Elise you’re here.”

  “I hope I’m not calling too early,” the woman said, arching her eyebrows in a way that seemed to invite confession.

  “Oh, no ma’am,” Hosanna said resolutely. “Miz Elise been up for hours.”

  Bright knew that wasn’t so. It was very late in the morning, the sun high and hot outside, and she had only heard her mother moving around upstairs in the past few minutes. Hosanna gave her a good, sharp look as Bright followed them into the parlor, where the woman spread herself on the sofa. Hosanna didn’t say anything, but Bright knew what she was thinking. You don’t tell nobody else yore bidness. Hosanna could tell you a lot without ever opening her mouth. She clomped off up the stairs and Bright stood in the middle of the room, with the coffee table between her and Mrs. Hardwicke, and stared some more. The mole seemed to grow bigger as you looked at it, the black hairs longer. The woman squirmed a bit. She had an ample behind, and even the tiniest squirm moved a lot of area. “How old are you?” she asked Bright.