by Robert Inman
“You have a mind’s eye, and I have a mind’s ear,” Bright said.
Dorsey laughed. “I suppose that’s so. What you want to do is to make the best of the place you are and work with what you’ve got.” Bright thought instantly of her mother, still asleep now in the upstairs bedroom, oblivious to the green, sparkling morning. Elise, who seemed unable to make a place for herself in the here and now. Elise never seemed livelier than when she had just returned from a visit with her parents in New Orleans, talking animatedly about the social affairs she had attended, especially during the Mardi Gras season—the glittering balls with ladies in sequined gowns, men dressed as buccaneers, everyone masked in mystery, everything very gay. Bright could not go along, of course, because she was in school. But Elise would return with a box full of trinkets and favors, remembrances of all she had seen and done. And she would regale Bright with details of it for days, spinning it out, making it last as long as possible. Then slowly, the magic would fade and the dancing light would go out of her eyes to be replaced by a sort of opaqueness that separated her from this place, this time. She doesn’t belong here, Bright thought to herself now.
Dorsey touched the lip of the radiator gingerly, loosened the cap and let the last pent-up steam whoosh out with a sigh, then picked up the bucket and poured the water in. The radiator filled and the water sloshed over the top and Dorsey waited for a moment before he put the cap back on. Then he took the bucket around to the rear of the motorcar and put it away, wiping his hands on an old diaper he kept in the rear compartment.
Bright followed him, stood watching as he stowed everything neatly. Then she asked her father, “Are you sorry Mama didn’t have any more babies?”
He didn’t look at her at first, and she wondered for a moment if he had heard her. Then he closed the lid of the rear compartment, snapped the latch, turned to her. She could see a flicker of something across his face, something a bit wistful. “Some things …,” he said after a moment, then paused again, searching for words. He shook his head, tossing away whatever he had been about to say, then smiled. “You’re all the baby girl I ever wanted. A baby girl who hears music inside her head, for goodness’ sake.”
They laughed and climbed back into the car and headed on down the Columbus Road with the morning brightening, the sun chasing the shadows away from the roadway and warming the inside of the car. As they drove, Bright forgot about her mother and began to anticipate the surprise ahead. They were well into the country now. A rabbit darted across the road in front of them and skittered into the woods on the other side. A mile or so beyond, they clattered across a wooden bridge and scared up a covey of doves feeding in the grass next to the creek bed. Farther on, they passed a wide field dotted with the yellow stubble of last year’s corn, and on the back side of the field, a black man following a mule-drawn plow, the harrow biting into the gray surface of the field and exposing rich brown earth ready for seed. They waved as they passed, and then just beyond the field, they turned off the main road and plunged into the woods along a narrow double-rutted trail with tall pine trees close on either side making a cave. Bright could hear the sound of the engine bouncing off the trees that grew shoulder to shoulder, their branches spreading over the roadway so that you saw only flecks of sunlight overhead. It was dark and cool underneath the canopy and Bright pulled the blanket around her again. Dorsey drove slowly and carefully, peering out through the windshield as he eased the automobile along. They were headed in the direction of the river now. Every so often, the cave would open into a small clearing, then narrow again. The trail got rougher as they went and the car bounced from side to side, tilting close to the trees as it lurched along. “Old logging trail,” Dorsey said over the noise of the bouncing car. “I logged this area fifteen or so years ago, before you were born, back when I was just starting out. We used mules and horses.” A road like this might do for mules and horses, Bright thought, but it was not much for a motorcar. She held on to her seat with both hands and clamped her jaw tightly to keep her teeth from banging against each other.
Then suddenly they broke free of the woods into a wide sandy clearing with a huge, gnarled live oak tree off to one side and low scrub brush at the perimeter. Under the oak tree was a neat stack of lumber, higher than Bright’s head, fresh-sawn and yellow. She eyed it curiously, but she didn’t say anything. Dorsey stopped the car at the near end of the clearing and turned off the engine and they sat there for a long moment, neither of them speaking, letting the quiet take over. Then underneath the quiet she heard the faint gurgle of the river. She followed the sound, saw the gap in the trees, how the land dropped off just beyond the clearing.
She climbed out of the car and ran to the edge of the clearing and stood, looking down the sloping embankment, seeing the glint of the river through the brush, flowing swiftly, gorged by the early spring rains. Down the bank she could see bits of litter, brush and twigs, caught in the branches of the bushes.
The water had risen here, as it had all along the river, a month before. She had stood then on the bank of the river next to her father’s lumberyard and watched the angry red water as it tumbled over itself, swirling past the town. It had only flooded a few low-lying fields and pastures along the river bottom, painting the land with a thin coat of mud that would be plowed under as soon as the land dried out. But another ten feet, and it would have gotten out of its banks. It worried Bright, imagining the river sweeping through her town. She wondered why people would build a town here at all, daring nature. But Dorsey said you couldn’t sit around waiting to see when a river would flood. It was rich land, eager to be plowed and built upon, and you had to get on with your life.
Dorsey stood next to her now at the edge of the clearing. “Is this the surprise?” she asked.
“Part of it,” he said. He took in the clearing with a sweep of his arm. “The best part is that lovely little camp house there.”
“Where?”
“Come back over here by the car and you can get a better view,” he said, and she followed him. The clearing lay open before them, bare except for the stack of lumber. She stared at it for a moment, and then she understood.
“I think I like the porch the best,” Bright said.
“Hmmmm. The porch. Yes, I think that’s a nice touch. I’m glad we decided to add the porch, aren’t you?”
She nodded and crossed her arms. “I think you should have a place to play when it’s raining that’s not inside and it’s not outside.”
“You have just described a porch, I think. And what about the door?” He cocked his head to the side a bit. “I think it looks nice right there in the middle. We could have put the door off to one side, but I think a door should go in the middle of a house, with windows on either side. At least, a front door should.”
“It looks more symmetrical that way,” Bright said.
“My, what a big word!”
“I learned it in school. When you fold a piece of paper in half and cut out something, like a doll or a Christmas tree or a tepee, then unfold it, you have a symmetrical.”
Dorsey studied the clearing for a moment. “What do you think about having the chimney on the right side?”
Bright thought about it. “That’s all right, because the big tree is on the left. And that makes it symmetrical. Sort of.”
“Yes,” Dorsey said, “I can see that.”
They stood together a while longer, looking at the place where the camp house would be, Bright imagining what it would be like to spend the night there and wake up early in the morning and stand on the front porch facing the new sun, then go inside, where her father would be frying ham, the lovely aroma of it filling the house and drifting out the windows.
“I haven’t been inside yet,” Bright said. “Does it have beds?”
Dorsey considered the matter. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it does have beds. There are two big rooms on the inside, one for sleeping and the other for living. The one for living has a cookstove in it and a table and
some chairs, and the one for sleeping has two beds.”
“One for you and one for me,” she said quickly.
“Well,” he said, “for whoever comes to visit.”
Bright looked around the clearing, at the big oak tree, at the woods close on both sides. It was quiet here except for the occasional call of a bird in the woods, the shrill sing of a cricket in the tall grass at the edge of the clearing, the murmur of the river beyond. You could hear all sorts of music in a place like this, she thought. It would make its own music, but you would have to be very still and quiet to hear all of it. It was a good place, and she already felt at home here, as if the camp house stood in reality just to the right of the big oak tree and smoke curled from the chimney, from her father’s breakfast fire. A place you could belong to.
Bright reached and took her father’s hand. “Will Mama come to the camp house?” she asked.
He thought about that for a moment, his face pensive. Then he said carefully, “I don’t think we’ll tell her about it just yet. We’ll build it just like we see it, and it will be a pretty little camp house. Then we’ll just put Mama in the car and bring her out here and surprise her.” He paused, then nodded. “She’ll like it. She likes pretty things.”
BOOK 3
8
As spring blossomed, they began to build the camp house. They worked at first only on Saturdays while school was still in session. Dorsey would get her up early and they would be away from the house by seven, carrying the lunch Hosanna had fixed the night before and left in a paper sack on the kitchen table—biscuits with thick slabs of ham, hard-boiled eggs wrapped in a piece of muslin, slices of pound cake, apples. By eight, they would be at work.
The second weekend they went to the clearing, there were more supplies next to the pile of lumber: a neat stack of bricks, several bags of cement covered by a canvas tarpaulin, a pile of yellow sand, a metal bucket, a long-handled shovel, and a shallow wooden box. Dorsey handed Bright the bucket. “You get the water,” he said.
“Where from?”
“There’s a whole river full of it down there,” he said, pointing.
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll fall in?”
Dorsey gave her a long look. “Yes,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ll fall in.”
“Then why are you letting me go to the river by myself?”
“Because I think you can do it,” he said simply. “And it’s more important for you to do it than it is for me to be afraid. If you get in trouble, holler.” Then he turned and walked toward the car to get his tools, leaving her there with the bucket in her hands.
Bright carried the bucket down the sandy embankment to where a small shelf jutted out into the river. The brush was thick on either side but she could see that the river made a big sweeping curve here, nestling the clearing in the crook of its arm like a mother would a baby. It was shallow on this side, just a foot or so deep, but several feet out into the river she could see where it dropped off into greenish-brown and then the bottom disappeared. On the far side, the current had undercut the high bank and exposed tree roots that dipped down into the water like the arms of an ancient, gnarled octopus. The water swirled under the roots, digging out a small dark cave, and she stared at it for a moment, wondering what river creatures lived there.
She stooped and held the bucket out into the water, letting the current fill it, then tried to stand and found that it was much too heavy to carry. So she poured the water out and tried again, letting it fill only partway before she lifted it from the river. It was still heavy, but she could carry it now. She struggled up the embankment with the bucket, feet digging deep into the sand and getting it down in her shoes. Almost to the top, she slipped and went down in the sand, and the bucket spilled, splashing her dress and leaving a dark wet spot on the sand. “Damnation,” she said, using one of Hosanna’s favorite words but saying it under her breath so that Dorsey would not hear. She sat there for a while, wondering if she really wanted to help build a camp house, then got up and brushed herself off and went back to the river. This time, she only got a little bit of water in the bottom and she toted it up the sandy bank without mishap. Dorsey was sitting on the stack of lumber, legs crossed, waiting for her. He had opened a bag of cement and had poured some of it, dry gray powder, into the shallow wooden box along with several shovelfuls of sand. “In there,” he said. The inch or so of water in the bottom of the bucket scarcely wet the top of the mound of cement.
“Is that enough?” she asked.
“No.” Dorsey shook his head. “I’d say another dozen trips or so should do it.”
Bright set the bucket down beside the cement trough and put her hands on her hips. “Why do I have to do the hard part?”
Dorsey laughed, rubbing his nose. “Oh, there’ll be plenty of hard parts for both of us. If you do all the easy parts and I do all the hard parts, then when the camp house is finished, you won’t have any sweat in it.”
“Little girls aren’t supposed to sweat,” Bright said. “Mama told me that.”
“Hmmmm. Yes, I imagine she did. And that may be true. But people who build camp houses sweat, especially when the weather gets hot, as it’s about to do. So you’ll have to make up your mind whether you want to be a little girl who doesn’t sweat or somebody who builds a camp house.”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
He gave her a hard look. “Well, make up your mind right now, because if you’re not interested in building the house, I’ll take you back to town and get on with the business.”
She could tell he meant it. He had that same look in his eyes that he did when he was running the lumberyard, issuing orders in his strong clear voice. Nobody at the lumberyard asked questions. They just did what Dorsey Bascombe said. Just about everybody did pretty much what Dorsey Bascombe said.
“Well,” Bright said, “I’m not going to be one of your niggers.”
She knew instantly that she had done something terribly wrong. She saw the hot flash of anger cross his face and he opened his mouth to speak, but stopped. He looked away from her then, staring at something in the trees over her head, and he sat there for a long time, nothing moving but a faint ripple of muscles in his lean jaw. Finally, he said, “Where did you hear that word?”
“What?”
“I’m going to say it just once so you’ll understand, and then I’m not ever going to say it again. Nigger. Where did you hear it?”
“Xuripha Hardwicke,” Bright said.
“Xuripha Hardwicke, excuse my French, is a damned fool. And if you use that word, you’re a damned fool, too.”
It stung her. She felt tears well up suddenly and fought them back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s not enough to be sorry,” he said. “Would you call Hosanna that?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because …” She stopped, confused, thinking about Hosanna, who was not black or white, just Hosanna. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Because you love her. Right?”
Bright nodded.
“And you wouldn’t do anything in the world to hurt her or make her feel bad. Right?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Hosanna’s skin is the same color as the men who work in my lumberyard. The good men I work with. And they are not”—his hard voice lashed out at her and she took a half step back—“what you called them. Do you understand me?”
Bright gulped and nodded.
Dorsey sat there for a long time, jaw still working. Bright stood frozen before him, stomach churning with the dread bile of his displeasure, wishing the ground would open and swallow her and she would tumble all the way to Heathen China. It was the most terrible feeling she could remember.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she said after a while, her voice very tiny.
He softened then, the hard lines easing from his face. “Then come here.”
He folded his arms around her and pressed her to him, and she melted agai
nst him, feeling the great strength in his body, the love pouring out, and she began to cry then. He let her go on for a moment and then he pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped her face. “Now,” he said. “That’s done. Done and over.” She calmed herself and sat on his knee, catching her breath. Then he set her down on the ground in front of him and held her by her arms. “Now, do you want to build a camp house with me, or do you want to go back to town?”
Ah, she thought, I do love him truly and dearly. But there was the other. She remembered her mother at the dinner table, melting in the hot glare of his disapproval, the helpless and desperate look on her face. It was a terrible thing, the moment itself and all that followed, the way her mother had seemed to shrink, to become separate and alone. Bright would do most anything to escape that. Even the thought of it filled her with a cold dread beyond bearing.
“I reckon I’ll stay,” she said finally.
He dropped his hands and gave her a big smile that warmed her to her toes. Then she picked up the bucket and went back to the river.
>
They would build the house well up off the ground, Dorsey said, in case the river ever got this far out of its banks. You could never tell about a river, he said. They have a mind of their own, and sooner or later they will do what rivers naturally do. So they started with brick piers, three feet high and eighteen inches square, nine of them evenly spaced like the outline of a tic-tac-toe game. Bright carried the bricks one at a time from the pile while Dorsey laid them. He was a meticulous worker. A trowelful of mortar was spread across the surface of the previously laid brick like gray cake icing, a new one placed carefully on top, tapped this way and that with the butt of the trowel while Dorsey squinted along the edges to line it up with the string that stretched along a wooden frame next to the pier, then scraped the excess mortar from the edges where it had squeezed out. And finally a spirit level laid on top of the brick to make sure everything was true and square.