The Spyglass Tree

by Albert Murray

  And I said, What did you think of that? and she said, I had to wonder if you thought you so smart you had my number but since there was something about you I said to myself, I’m just going to give him the benefit of the doubt and find out what he think he putting down. And I said, I sure am glad you did and I sure do thank you for such a special treat, and she said, Well, that’s what you get for being such a nice boy.

  While I was pulling my clothes back on, she sat on the edge hunched forward with her legs crossed and her left elbow on her knee smoking and asking me about Mobile and the Gulf Coast and when she stood up I had the feeling that she really wanted us to go on talking. So when she said, You better come back to see me now and I really mean it, I got the feeling that she was just as interested in talking again as she was in doing business.

  I said, I sure will, but I didn’t say when because I didn’t have any idea when there would be enough cash for something like that again. There was no point in putting up a front; and you couldn’t put on the poor mouth, so I just smiled and touched her as if I were really looking forward to it, and she said, You sure better.

  Then she said, Come on now, I got to get you out of here so you can be back across town before that curfew sound. Ain’t no use to you missing that since you already got what you come over here for, and I said, And more, much more, and she said, Tell me anything, Mobile, but you take care of yourself and hit them books and don’t be no stranger over here.

  Downstairs, she left me in the little sitting room to wait for my old pardner and he came in from down the hall before I even sat down, and back outside in the damp central Alabama autumn night once more with our sports jackets draped over our shoulders cape-style, we slapped palms, and I said, Hey, man, goddamn, hey, man, how can I ever thank you enough for getting Old Troop to include me on this, and he went into his penny-dreadful heh-heh-heh again and said, You can’t, old pardner. It’s not allowed. Absolutely not. Strictly forbidden. Rigoureusement interdit! which he articulated better than any student I ever met and which, what with our make-believe capes, also turned us into two elegant flâneurs winding our way back across fin-de-siècle Paris from Montmartre to the Left Bank.

  But once we were back in Atelier 359 with the lights out but still too high to fall right off to sleep, he said, One more thing, old pardner. Tell me. When you hit the homestretch, did she start snapping her fingers, and I cut in and said, Saying sic ’em, and he said, Yes, and I said, Or maybe sic ’em baby or sic ’em daddy, and he said, So yours too, and I said, Not this one but I know what you mean and he said, It caught me by surprise but it was really something, and I said a little something idiomatic. I said, A little down-home stuff for the city boy from up north. Man, she had your number as soon as she saw us.

  On our second visit which was during the study break just before the fall term finals and which was also a surprise treat from Old Troop, it was as if my new friend in the district had in the meantime become my old friend, if not an old long lost friend. When we checked in and turned around, she was looking down from the staircase with one hand on the railing and one on her hip.

  Well, look who finally made it back, she said, talking to me but looking over my head as if at nothing in particular. Then she said, Get yourself on up here, Mobile. Where you been, boy? I thought I told you not to come making yourself no stranger over here. You make people feel like maybe you done decided not to have nothing more to do with them or something. And I said, No days like that. I said, Never no days like that for me and you.

  I said, You know how it is when you’re a first-term freshman, especially when you’re on a full scholarship. You got to keep your grade point average up in the outstanding bracket, and you also have to convince the people on the academic merits committee that you are here because you really mean business, you see for me to make just a fair or even a good passing grade is exactly the same thing as flat flunking out.

  Hey so you up here on one of them special scholarship things, she said, standing back to look me over again nodding her head up and down in what looked for all the world to me at that time with very thinly disguised fairy godmotherly pride and approval. Now that’s nice. Now that really is very nice.

  Then she stood back with her hands akimbo, smiling while shaking her head in mock disbelief and said, Now see there. Class. I knew it. Because I can tell. As soon as I set eyes on you, I said to myself, um-hunh, um-hunh, um-hunh, and I also said, I bet he think he cute too, but you didn’t smile that kind of smile and that’s how come I liked you right off. You know what you smile like with them bright eyes squinting like that? A very nice boy full of mischievousness.

  But talking about some more smart eyes, don’t think I didn’t pick up on how that cute buddy you come over here with was casing this joint right along with all them friendly smiles and respectful manners Sarajean was telling me about him and she said he is definitely the nicest northern city boy she ever come across and she been in this life for a whole lot of more years than I been. Some we get in here think they so much because they from up there, and don’t know doodly squat. But she say your buddy got real class and she swear he also just thumbs down the smartest fellow she ever met anywhere.

  She sure did get that right, I said, and she said, I told her ain’t no flies on my down-home Mobile boy either. Then reaching for my belt buckle she said, But later for all that. Now come on, show me how much you been missing me because it’s been so long.

  It was the same room as before. There was the same blurred-static sound of radio music and chatter somewhere downstairs again, but as she helped me out of my shorts and I sat down to pull off my socks this time there was also the dry smokeless warmth from the flame-yellow grill of the gas space heater because the temperature outside was dropping toward the freezing point.

  Then as she began whispering and brushing her warm gingerbread-spongy lips against my neck and ears again as before, but also with a few new words added, there was also the shushing and shivery winter night breeze buffeting the shuttered and shuddering window frames and whining and shrilling away through the December bareness of the yard trees. But after a very little while all of that was only another part of what I would remember as the background for me and her doing me and you and you and me the second time.

  So if I ask you who she was you going to tell me? she said, pulling on her kimono and following me into the bathroom again, and when I said, Who who was, she said, Now come on boy. Don’t be trying to crosstalk me.

  She said, Now, you know good and well what I’m talking about and don’t come telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. The one you learned all of your nice little bedroom manners from; that’s who. You might be one of them scholarship geniuses that can learn anything in a split second. But you can’t fool me about nothing like this, boy. You didn’t just pick up on something on no one go-round. Some woman know exactly what she doing had a hold of you and don’t tell me she didn’t.

  She sure did, I said, thinking about Miss Slick McGinnis and her velvet smooth tea-cake tan skin and her Josephine Baker rubber-doll body, and how when she used to come click clacking along Buckshaw sidewalk past Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s barbershop and up the steps and into Stranahan’s store all the men and boys on the block used to fall silent and then just look at each other and shake their heads and also about how the windup gramophone record that went with the way she walked was the one with the words that said, I want to go where you go and do what you do then I’ll be happy.

  But I didn’t name any names because that was not what was expected. All you had to do was admit that there was somebody. So I just said that there was somebody who decided that was the way she was going to help keep me out of trouble and finish high school and win my chance to go to college as so many people by that time had come to expect me to do.

  Well, good for her, she said, and as we came back into the bedroom you could also hear the wind rising and whirring through the bare branches outside the shutters again. She al
l right with me whoever she is and wherever she may be these days, she said, waiting for me to put everything back on. I hope you know how lucky you been and I am pretty sure you do and that’s another reason you all right with me with your little old cute, sly fox, narrow-eye smile.

  Then as she hooked her arm into mine and we came on along the hall to the head of the stairs, she also said, I know you know good and, well, I ain’t just talking about controlling your nature because I’m satisfied I don’t have to tell you ain’t nobody going to be complaining about no wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am in no house like this. Now if I was to be talking about some tough-ass old hens want you spend all night with them, that’s another thing.

  She said, When it come to all of that what I mean is, you might know how to do what you supposed to do with that nice sweet thing all night, but the first thing you better know is when you supposed to keep it in your pants. So the one that schooled you about that deserve a lot of credit, she said.

  And then she said, What I’m trying to tell you right now, that you all right with me because whoever she was she didn’t spoil you so rotten that you go around acting like somebody supposed to feel like you doing them a big favor just because you having something to do with them. I’m just trying to tell you how much a woman can appreciate you for being so nice on top of all that other stuff. So now just get on out of here and I hope I see you again before long.

  I didn’t realize that all of that had anything to do with her in any sense that was directly personal and private until she told me what she told me about herself that next time, which was also the Old Trooper’s last treat and so also the end of the orientation leeway he had allowed his two trail recruits to get themselves zeroed in on campus and in certain outlying regions as well.

  So what I remember thinking about as we whistled our way through town and then came on across the highway and into the district that night was about how in the letter with my roommate’s February allowance (and the treat), the Old Trooper had used the word triangulation, not orientation. Both were about map making and map reading and also about personal adjustment, but triangulation was also a military term that was very much about target practice.

  That was what was on my mind when I rearrived in the district on my third visit that Thursday night. It was not as if I didn’t also remember everything that had been said the time before. After all, I had repeated it verbatim to my roommate the following morning. But one reason that I hadn’t stopped to think much less to consider about any of it was that by that time I had become so used to having people talk to me about such things that most of it usually sounded like reiteration rather than information.

  Not that I ever really closed my ears to any of it. Not me. Not Miss Melba’s Scooter. Not Miss Tee’s Mister. Because for all the clichés, platitudes, and sometimes downright mushy sentimentality about making folks proud (mostly without any mention whatsoever of envy, resentment, backbiting, spite, or slander) and for all the same old stuff about taking advantage of opportunities other people either never had or had and didn’t take, there was still the fact that whatever they said was something they sincerely believed they were obliged to say so perhaps the main point of it all was to remind you of precisely that which everybody knew you were supposed to be mindful of already.

  Anyway, it was not until she said what she said while I was getting dressed that third time that I realized that she was really concerned about something that had much more to do with her own personal situation in particular than with me on general principle.

  She had asked me to tell her some more about growing up on the outskirts of Mobile, and when I came to the part about school and told her about how a lot of students used to come all the way out to Mobile County Training School not only from within the city limits of downtown Mobile itself and from Prichard and Cedar Grove and Chickasaw Whistler and Maysville, but also from as far away across the bay as Daphne, Fairhope, and Magnolia Springs, she said, Now see there, you never learn unless you ask. Boy, that sounds just like the kind of school I’m sure going to be trying my best to get my Roger in one of these days when he old enough.

  Roger was a three-year-old son that she had left with her mother, who was now living in Fort Deposit. She didn’t even mention anything at all about who Roger’s father was, and I didn’t ask anything. From what she said about how she ran away from home to go to Birmingham, I was pretty sure that she had not been married and that when she became pregnant she had had to look out for herself, but she mentioned that only in passing because what she was mainly if not only really interested in telling me about was the kind of man she wanted Roger to be.

  Not what she wanted him to be, such as a doctor, lawyer, businessman, teacher, or a political leader. That was going to be up to him to choose once he had come along far enough in school to make his own choice. The main thing she wanted him to become was somebody worthwhile and also somebody you could always count on.

  I just want him to have his chance to make something out of hisself. I sure God don’t want him to end up on on chain gang in no penitentiary. I don’t want him out there trying to lie and steal and cheat and double-cross his way. Just look at you, she said. That’s what I’m talking about. Done made it all the way up here in college because you can make it on your own scholarship. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, I want my Roger to turn out like you turning out so far. Boy, your folks got to be mighty proud of you and I’m sure you know it too, you rascal you.

  X

  As for mothers, I said one night not long afterward, I have three at the same time. Because along with Mama herself there had always been Miss Tee, and then when I had come that far as a pupil over at Mobile County Training School there was also Miss Lexine Metcalf who not only said but also acted as if I also belonged to her.

  The only thing I remember that Mama actually told me about my kinship to her was about how all babies came from the soft dark insides of a very special stump hole deep in the brambles and moss-fringed thickets where the baby man hid you like a seed to be found like an Easter egg on your birthday by the woman he picked to be your mother, who was the one who swaddled you to her bosom and gave you nourishment and kept you safe from the bad old booger man. Which was why your mother was the one you already owed your obedience long before you came to realize that you also had a father.

  That was all she had ever told me before I overheard what she said that night at Mister Ike Meadow’s wake, and that is the way she let it stay even when she told me what she told me about not letting that thing in my pants get me in trouble because she had decided that the time had come when she had to start warning me about getting girls in the family way. As for the contradiction between this version of the miracle of birth and the other, I am pretty sure that she just took it for granted that by that time I had found out enough about men and women to understand exactly what she was concerned about and the main point of it was to keep me from having to drop out of school to get married. In any case, she never revised her original version of the arrival of babies, just as she never revised her original version of Santa Claus.

  All I had ever heard about me and Miss Tee was that she was my auntie, and at first that was what I used to call her. Actually, what I used to say was Ann Tee. Then I changed it to Miss Tee. But what she called me was not her nephew but her Mister as in Mister Man, and I always knew that she was a very special kind of auntie, because everybody knew that she was not Mama’s flesh and blood sister, like Aunt Sue from Atmore and Aunt Sis from Greenville. In fact, she almost always acted as if Mama and Papa were really her aunt and uncle.

  For the most part, people in Gasoline Point in those days didn’t spend very much time puzzling over such relationships unless there was some special reason to do so. After all, just about everybody in town had aunts and uncles, not to mention cousins close and distant who included perhaps as many if not more self-elected kinfolks as blood relatives. But there were also always at least a few aunts- and uncl
es-at-large around. Like Aunt Classie Belsaw, for instance, and Uncle Jim Bob Ewing, to name only two, who for their part called everybody not Nephew or Niece but either Son or Daughter or Brother or Sister, meaning little brother and little sister.

  I don’t remember ever hearing anybody wondering about what all of that was about and certainly not about how it all came about. It was just the way things were and one day you realized that you already knew about it. In due time, you also came to realize that there were also aunts- and uncles-at-large who were called Mama and Papa and Daddy or even Papadaddy, as in Big Mama and Big Daddy and once again it was as if nobody had ever had to stop and define them because somehow you had already found out that old folks were who they were by virtue of being survivors-in-residence, who were there to tell the tale, who could give eyewitness testimony about bygone but ever-to-be-remembered times in which definitive events came to pass.

  Nor did anyone have to question the fact that such mamas (and hot mamas) as Ma Rainey the blues singer and vaudeville prima donna and such papas and daddies as even Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy were neither older nor wiser than such venerable aunts- and uncles-at-large as Aunt Classie Belsaw and Uncle Jim Bob Ewing who after all were the very embodiment of endurance and wisdom. Hot mamas and papadaddies were who they were because they were not only experts in their line of work but also pros and past masters who were qualified by the unique richness of personal experience to exemplify for peers and juniors alike how things should be done. Thus, when a young man called himself Papa or Daddy, he was bragging that he was so much better than his competitors that he could turn any contest into a demonstration lesson in fundamentals.

  What made such youthful presumption acceptable to people in Gasoline Point in those days was the fact that it showed that you were not afraid to put yourself on the spot. If it turned out that you were only running off at the mouth and couldn’t perform on the level you had set up for yourself, you only brought public disgrace on yourself. Once you proved yourself, you could admit that you were the champion who must defend his title. That was okay. But any further expression of gratuitous self-esteem was soundly condemned as the height of unforgivable arrogance.