The Spyglass Tree

by Albert Murray

  With Miss Evelyn Kirkwood it was almost as if you were not really taking very much of a chance at all, because all you had to do was what she said because she was a grown-up and I was only in my early teens, and every time I was in her presence during the four or five weeks that we were doing what we did I was supposed to be running routine errands and then helping her to get packed to join her husband up in Muscle Shoals near the Tennessee state line where he had moved on to a new civil engineering project when he finished his contract on the Alabama State docks along Mobile River. But I was not really working for her because as hard as Papa always had to hustle to make ends meet, he and Mama were dead set against ever hiring me out to white folks. So as far as they were concerned, I was over there as a return favor for something Mister Garrett Kirkwood had done for Papa.

  She said, You smell like you just washed yourself with Pine Tar soap. That’s nice. That’s Aunt Melba and Uncle Whit and all that sweeping and brushing and scrubbing and washing for you. So come on in and come on over here and let me look at you. Nice. Very nice. Don’t be afraid. You’re not afraid of me, are you? I always thought that you thought that I was a very pretty lady, she said, and I said, I do. Because she was, with what I now remember as her Gainsborough eyes and complexion and her anatomy-sketchbook calves and insteps, I’m not going to bite you, she said. That’s a good boy, she said. Nice, very nice. You knew I wasn’t going to bite you, didn’t you, she said. Because it sure doesn’t look to me like you’re scared one bit. So I guess I must know something about picking and choosing brown sugar lumps, she said. And she did not say anything at all about not telling anybody because she knew she didn’t have to; but she did emphatically say, And don’t be calling me no Miss Eve like in evil. Call me Miss Ev. Everybody else called her Miss Evelyn or Miss Evelyn Hughes (as in the old Hughes family and place up the Tombigbee) or Miss Evelyn Hughes Kirkwood, and so did I when something about her came up in public, but in private she sometimes gave me other names to call her along with some of the things she told me to do.

  You know something man, I told my roommate, man, that’s just not something you let yourself go around thinking about. I said, Man, once you get away with some stuff like that you’re glad it happened, and that’s it.

  As for the caper that he had decided that he owed it to his conception of himself to try to bring off before ending his sojourn in the Deep South, he had already spotted somebody who met all of his requirements. She was a certified Southern belle from a bona fide antebellum mansion who just happened to be a co-manager of a department store on Courthouse Square a few doors down from Tate and Davidson’s, not because she had been trained for a career in the retail business but because she had inherited half-ownership from a childless uncle on her mother’s side of the family.

  Do you know the one I’m talking about, he said, and I said, No but I’ll take your word for it, and he said, Not this time, old pardner, because sophomores that we still are alas I want to make sure that you don’t jump to any sophomoric conclusions about wishful thinking compensation, or some other Viennese bullshit. He said, I want you to go down there and see for yourself, old pardner, I insist, old pardner. So I did go down as if looking around for a gift for a girlfriend, and when I saw her come out of the office I caught my breath and crossed my fingers, and when I finally came back to the room from the gym that night I said, Man I sure am still a sophomore all right because I do believe you wished it all up and sent me down there knowing that I would see only what you wanted me to see, and he said, No Pygmalion land no Galatea she. So I said, That leaves us with Herr Doktor Faustus and his snake-oil princess, and he said, Some snake some oil some princess.

  She may have been a year or two older than we were, but she had been away to finishing school and on cruises to Europe and the Near East, and perhaps that along with her several years of very active experience as a businesswoman made her seem older than she was and certainly older than she looked, which was less than twenty-five at most.

  Whatever her exact age, she was the kind of very good-looking and casually style-conscious young Southern woman that images of certain New York fashion models have been based on for generations. Also, not only was she herself one of the most prominent young women in town and not only was her store as popular as it was classy, but it also had the most up-to-date college shop in town, which attracted a lot of students from the campus in spite of all of their very strong reservations about shopping in a store facing a courthouse square with a Confederate army memorial as its centerpiece.

  So the first step turned out to be easy. He went into the manager’s office and introduced himself as a student of architecture and design who wanted to ask her some questions about current trends in fashion, art, and interior decoration for a term project he was working on, and before he came back out he had also made her aware of his easy and thorough familiarity with every type of article in the current and recent issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and House and Garden stacked on her desk.

  Within the next ten days, he was being paged to take phone calls in the booth off the lounge, at first just about every other night, and then every night, and within the month she had begun picking him up either in her sedan or her coupé, sometimes in the traffic circle between the gym and the tennis courts, sometimes near the water tower near the science hall and sometimes in the parking lot behind the library, and they would drive out to one of the campus groves or orchards that were a part of the horizon you saw when you looked out across the fields and pastures from the administration center of the school of agriculture.

  Then suddenly after the third rendezvous the whole thing became a very private matter that he hardly ever mentioned except in passing until the final week of his last spring term when he started packing his luggage to pull out for good in the next day or so. I knew he was going to bring it up then, and he did. He said, About my caper I know you would understand what was happening. At first it was something I had to do for the hell of it but as soon as it actually became something person to person, it was no longer my caper but also her caper and so our caper, so from then on the taboo was as much a catalytic agent as it was anything else. If you know what I mean, he said, and I said, I think I do, I really do. But when I said what I said about answers to the old folks’ prayers, there was an unmistakable touch of tolerant surprise and exasperation in his old playful sidewise glance and conspiratorial wink and smile as he said, That rather depends on which old folks ones been listening to, doesn’t it old pardner? What about the ones who say you can never really call yourself a man among men until you have taken it on yourself to pull the caper I tried and get away with it. Come on man, I thought we agreed that we do indeed choose some of our ancestors.

  But don’t get me wrong about this caper thing roommate, and don’t play yourself cheap because I’m not. I wouldn’t lie to you, old pardner. And he said, You know something? As pleased as I can’t help but be about how all of this turned out I still find myself wishing that she had been the one who picked me out. So don’t think I don’t know that down-home boys who’ve been through what you’ve been through don’t feel that they have to go through what I took on. I know as well as you do that it can’t possibly add up to the same results.

  So what now? I said as he went on packing his steamer trunk. And he said, The moving finger having writ moves on. It turns out that she does get up to Chicago on business trips from time to time, and she might give me a call as she volunteered to do. Or she might not. Meanwhile it was what it was and I’m better of for it.

  Then three days later, his sojourn in the central Alabama strip of the briar patch at an end, he had cut back out to Chicago once more from where he was to move on to the also and also of other temporary destinations, beyond which there would always be still other horizons evoking newly pertinent ancestral aspirations and expectations and therefore obligations accepted or not, fulfilled or not.

  Nor did any of that seem to faze him very much, if at all.
Not him who was forever reminding me as well as himself that for all your carefully laid plans and expert training and guidance, a picaresque story line was the perpetual frame of reference for all personal chronicles.

  Not T. Jerome Jefferson, T for Thomas, J for Jerome as in Geronimo, Apache or not, and also as in the Hieronymus. Who was never to be called Thomas Jefferson or Jerry Jefferson and certainly not Tee Jay as in Tee Jay period, but who was often called the Snake as in Snake Doctor and sometimes by extension Doctor Snakeshit, to wit, Shakespeare, the author of as many quotations as Anonymous himself! If you were known as snakeshit on the campus in those days, you were obviously somebody for whom doing things as required by the book was a snap, and who could talk as if sounding like a book was the most natural thing in the world.

  But even as he used to say yea verily and reach for his notebook to record the goods on something, the T. Jerome Jefferson that I had recognized from the very outset as the best of all possible roommates ever and who was now almost a full year’s long since long gone to other encounters elsewhere, always sounded to me as if as far as he was concerned, anything that was to be found in books, especially schoolbooks, even the most advanced schoolbooks, was not unlike the data on timetables, maps, and mileage charts. Elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary.

  XXI

  All the way out from the campus that Thursday evening the main thing on my mind was the stack of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington recordings that Hortense Hightower and I had pulled out and started playing the week before. Beginning with “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” we had spent all of the first hour listening to such Armstrong instrumentais as “Potato Head Blues,” “Weary Blues,” “West End Blues,” “Weather Bird,” “Beau Koo Jack,” and “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” among others, each of which had become an instant standard as soon as shipments of it arrived at music stores and the record counters of department stores all over the country.

  Then we had moved on to “Stardust,” the national brown-skin dance-hall anthem since my junior high school days, “Lazy River,” “I’m Confessin’,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “Swing That Music” on which his epoch, yes epoch-making vocals were either matched or exceeded by his solo trumpet choruses. So then there were all of those recent show tunes like “Thanks a Million,” “It’s Wonderful,” “I Double Dare You,” “I’m in the Mood for Love,” and so on, which made all pop singers want to sing like him from then on.

  That took us up to the last fifteen minutes and we closed out with Armstrong taking the vocal and trumpet choruses on his band’s version of Ellington’s “Solitude,” followed by Ellington’s playing his own instrumental arrangement of his “Sophisticated Lady,” which to this very day still takes me back to the way things used to be between me and the girls at Mobile County Training School between the ninth grade and the year I graduated and left town.

  There was only enough time for one more then and since we had finally made it to the Ellington stack, we wrapped things up with a preaudition of the next week by playing “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing,” which I then whistled along with “Swing that Music” and Armstrong and the Red Onions’ “Cake Walkin’ Babies from Home” all the way back to the dormitory.

  I already knew what my first selection was going to be and I had started whistling it as I came through the red-brick columns of the Emancipation Memorial Archway with the crown of three rings. It was “Echoes of Harlem,” which was also called “Cootie’s Concerto” because it featured Cootie Williams (who was from Mobile!) but which I liked just as much for the striding piano and bass fiddle figure that also made me think of it as a nocturne that was a perfect movie soundtrack for uptown hep cats on the prowl from after-hours ginmills to the wee hours key clubs along patent leather avenues.

  Of course, there was also Ellington’s music about the atmosphere of Harlem by day or night such as “Harlem Speaks,” “Uptown Downbeat” and “I’m Slapping’ Seventh Avenue with the Sole of My Shoe”; and there were other concertos such as “Barney’s Concerto” also known as “Clarinet Lament,” and for Rex Stewart’s cornet there was “Boy Meets Horn,” and for the alto of Johnny Hodges there was “Sentimental Lady” among many others.

  As I came on toward the point where the paved sidewalk used to end in those days, I was whistling and humming my way through passages that I already knew from “Hip Chic,” “Buffet Flat,” “Jazz Potpourri,” “Battle of Swing,” and “Slap Happy,” but from time to time in spite of myself I couldn’t keep myself from wondering what she had in mind when she said she was playing around with the idea of making me a proposal that she was almost certain was going to surprise me. So I had to remember to pace myself and not get there ahead of time.

  But as soon as she let me into the darkened hallway, I could tell that somebody else was already there and that something else was already happening.

  Well, here’s that schoolboy right on the dot, she said. And I said, As scheduled. I said, Never is to be no CPT for me, Miss Boss Ladee, and she said, Come on back this way, and I followed her to the end of the hall and down the steps to what turned out to be the toilet for the basement party area, and that is when I saw Will Spradley for the first time.

  Naked to the waist and with a towel around his shoulders like a shawl, he was sitting crossways on the closed toilet seat holding his bloody and swollen face over the washbasin, grunting and sighing and waiting for her, and she said, This is Will Spradley. He got himself all tangled up in a mess that looks like it might get bigger before it’s over. So come on over here and help me with this, she said, and handed me a bottle of witch hazel, a vial of Mercurochrome, a package of gauze bandages, and a roll of tape from the cabinet behind the mirror above the basin and went on doing what she was doing to his face and head with the washcloth and towel, and that’s when the phone rang upstairs.

  So I took over while she went back up the stairs to the entrance hallway to answer it, and I saw the gashes and knots and puffs on his head and face and the bruises on his arms and torso, and every time he had to make any movement he grunted, and when he was not gasping from sudden stabs of sharp pain he was sighing and mumbling to himself, saying mostly the same thing over and over, answering his own questions as if the right words would undo what had happened. Unh unh unh, just look at all this now. Just look at it. You ever seen anything like this in your life? I know good and well I ain’t never seen nothing like this in all of my born days. I swear to God. All of this and what did I do? I ain’t done nothing. I ain’t done nothing to nobody.

  When she came back, she led him out to the couch near the small crescent-shaped bar in the party room where, along with an upright piano, a regular professional rockola, and a console radio, there as also a stack of folded bridge tables and chairs, a big round poker table, and a pool table.

  That was him, she said. He’s on his way but there’s something else he’s got to attend to first, and Will Spradley said, I got to see him because I got to tell him, because God knows I wasn’t trying to get him in no trouble like this, and she said, Take it easy, Will, we know that; and Will Spradley said, All I was doing was what I was supposed to do and I just happened to run into Gile and that’s what I told Dud Philpot and that’s all I told him because I wasn’t trying to get nobody in no trouble. That’s how come I come on out here. Because I didn’t want nobody to see me going back out to the Pit, and she said, He knows that, Will. She said, I called him as soon as you made it out here.

  All I was trying to do was what I was supposed to be doing and now look at all this, Will Spradley said. I declare before God, he moaned, touching his back and sides with his swollen left hand and pressing the cold damp folded face towels to his mouth and nose as I passed them to him while she went on trying to patch up his gashes and bruises using the Mercurochrome for some, Band-Aids for others, and gauze bandages for the larger ones.

  Man, just look at you, she said, so just tell me one thing. How in the hell did you go a
nd get yourself all tied up with some old poor white trash bloodsucker like Dud Philpot in the first goddamn place? You got to know better than that, Will Spradley, and he said, I don’t know, Boss Lady. I just don’t know, and she said, You hear this stuff, Schoolboy. As for myself, I still haven’t been able to figure out how some of our people live to get to be as old as they do. It’s a goddamn mystery to me how they don’t poison themselves to death through just plain old dumbness.

  Wait a minute, just a minute, just a minute, she said then and went over to a closet and came back and said, Here, help him into this, and handed me a faded blue-and-gray plaid sport shirt and put an old worn golf jacket on the chair by the couch. The shirt was size forty-two. Will Spradley was about size forty, but he was just about six feet even, and he must have weighed about a hundred and eighty-five lean hard pounds. I didn’t know what Dud Philpot looked like then, but later I found out that he was in his early fifties and was about five-eleven and weighed about a hundred and forty-some bony-butt stooped-shouldered perpetually restless pounds.

  I want you to know how much obliged I am to you for this you doing for me, Miss Boss Lady, Will Spradley said. I really do, he said, and I never will forget it as long as I live, he said, and she said, Which thanks to all this mess you now got us all in may not be all that long. And he said, Consarn the luck. I know it, Miss Boss Lady, and that’s what bothers me more than anything else and that’s exactly why I come all the way over here trying to warn Gile.