She went home and found the kitchen floor covered with her baskets, old cardboard boxes, her pots and the coal bucket, all heaped with apples, overripe peaches, tomatoes picked against the frost when green but ripening now, peppers, celery, even onions and potatoes. She was gaping at the welcome mess in wonder when Clovis stuck his head around the bedroom door to explain that Bunkin, who had just gone, had brought the stuff because he had no place to store it and it wouldn’t keep any longer.
“That Bunkin,” Clovis said, shaking his head half enviously, “he bought him a piece of uv a old farm, four, five acres, somewhere outside a Detroit, soon as him an his wife could scrape enough together—she’s worked some a th time. He allus aimed to stay, he said. That was more’n three years ago. He’s put him up a garage—all paid fer, an fixed so’s they can kinda batch in it in th summer—an now while th strike’s on he’s a starten on a house.”
“I allus thought you said he was kind of foolish,” Gertie said, still glad of the vegetables, but remembering that this was the day for Joe. Now she couldn’t go out to him and see—What had she wanted to see? Of course she would see the same thing she had seen last time, the nephew, smiling, weighing vegetables. Trouble and worry had sickened her mind so that she was always imagining silly things, she told herself, as she sat by the kitchen door and marked for painting some pieces of dolls that Clovis had sanded. Still, when she heard Joe’s calling she sprang up and stood watching until the truck had stopped and she had seen the long but young-looking hand give a grapefruit to Mrs. Miller. She was worried, wondering if Mrs. Miller, who had been gone the other day, noticed the boy’s face now; but today Mrs. Miller was so busy gossiping and laughing that she seemed to notice nothing.
Next afternoon she was painting a dozen left legs a bright and shiny red when Sophronie came tapping. She stood in the kitchen, throwing quick, worried glances about her, like some little hopping tree bird that never feels safe on the ground. “They’re pretty,” she said of the doll parts, with a loudness unusual for her. She gave an uneasy glance toward the bedroom where Clovis stayed, then asked, still more loudly: “Have you got any sage? I’m a tryen tu fix a stuffed beef heart—they’re cheap and real good if you stuff um right.”
Gertie got down the sage, old now, but still better than the stuff from stores. Sophronie gave a swift, uneasy glance about her, then came very close to Gertie and whispered up to her as she took the sage, “Come out on th stoop.” Then loudly again, for any listening ears, “Have you seen Miz Bommarita’s new winter coat? She’s got it out a airen on her line.”
Gertie followed and closed both kitchen doors, though the radio was going, loud, for Clovis was running the sanding contraption. She realized as she went onto the stoop and pretended to look at the coat, that Sophronie had come just now because of the covering sounds. She listened, staring at the coat, while Sophronie stood a little behind her and whispered rapidly: “That Miz Miller she’s invited me tu go to a midnight show, downtown, double feature that’ll make us gone most a th night. I gotta go—Whit’s maken me. She’s gonna ast you. Don’tcha. They’re up to somethen; too much’s goen on. You stay an—That shore is pretty. I wisht I had one like it.” Mrs. Bommarita had come out onto her stoop, and Sophronie, after some loud remarks about the goodness of home-grown sage and the beauties of the coat, hurried home.
Mrs. Miller came that afternoon. “I’m gonna celebrate,” she said. “We’re leaven pretty soon. I don’t think we’ll stay to git all my unemployment money. I’m gitten jumpier and jumpier when Buckandy’s gone to th steel mill—another cable broke last night, an one pitman got it pretty bad.” She went on to tell in her loud rushing voice of how she wanted to take Gertie and Sophronie to a real fine show; her husband would chauffeur them there and back and in between times act as baby sitter, tomorrow night, his night off.
Gertie shook her head, and tried to smile. “Law, I ain’t got no time tu go to a show. I wouldn’t know how to act in one a them big downtown places.”
Mrs. Miller only nodded, “I don’t neither, butcha gotta learn some time. I told Buckandy I jist hadda go. Yu know, back home people’ull ast me, ‘How was Detroit?’ an I’ll hate to say, ‘I never did go down to lookut it.’ Honest to God, I ain’t never been downtown. I’ve allus kinda wanted to, an if I don’t while I’ve got th chance I’ll allus wish I had. Like now, I already wish I’d learned wot I made in u shop. Fer almost three years I hadda same job, welden five little jiggers on a little piece a steel; somebody said they thought they went somewheres inu battleship, but I know they ain’t battleships enough inu whole world tu use all them little pieces I welded.” She remembered the object of her errand, pulled her chair closer, insisting, “Come on now, yu gotta, yu jist gotta go.”
Clovis heard, and came begging Gertie to go, grew more and more insistent, and was for an instant surly when she would not promise. Then he was like a man remembering to put on his Sunday behavior as he pointed out that she needed to get out and have a little pastime once in awhile.
He fussed at times even after Mrs. Miller had gone, and worse, he told Clytie when she came home of the chance her mother was throwing away to go downtown to a real movie palace. Clytie whined most of the evening because Gertie wouldn’t go; she had long wanted to see the real downtown Detroit, but like many of the alley children she had never been there.
Next day Clovis began his persuadings again, though it seemed to Gertie he was careful not to act too interested; and he was meek as could be when she turned on him. “Man, what ails you? Here I am tired to death with all kinds of work to do, dolls, an some patchen jist has to be done, an you tell me to rest my self by goen to a movie. You know I wouldn’t like th movies no better than th radio. I’d swap em all fer a walk in nice clean woods, an enyhow I’ve got a headache.”
He looked worried at that, for there was between them no memory of her ever having mentioned pain. “You ain’t comen down?” he asked.
She sighed windedly, “No. Mostly, I recken, it’s stayen inside too close with th gas smell an th paint smell frum these dolls, an I’ve been stayen up too late. Tonight I’m aimen tu go to bed early an git a good night’s sleep.”
He said no more, but she could see he was dissatisfied and restless. He tinkered with and cleaned up all the contraptions in the house, and oiled all the door hinges. Finished with that, he tramped around the house and quarreled about being penned up with a black eye. Then he was still for a long while in Clytie’s room, and she thought he was fixing the inside window so it would work better, but when he came out to her, smiling a little, she jumped in startlement. He had a hat jammed low on his forehead to hide the mark above his eye, and different from his usual neat ways, he hadn’t shaved for days, so that his whiskers covered the bruise on his jaw. Going closer, she saw he had powdered his forehead; the mark showed less, but his whole face had an odd look.
It pleased him that he looked strange to her. “Pretty soon,” he said, “I can job hunt an take my turn in u picket line. Th union’ll be thinken I don’t care nothen about th strike.”
“You ought to tell th union what you’ve already done fer it,” she said with some bitterness. “If they hadn’t been no union, you wouldn’t ha been hurt.”
“Tellen th union ud be might’ nigh as bad as tellen th cops. They’re allus screamen their heads off fer law an order—them higher ups. An anyhow, Whit wasn’t certain, but—” He was suddenly interested in a passing moving van.
She never asked him to finish what he had started to say; the boy who had been a soldier wouldn’t cry over a few black eyes. She tried to put her mind steadfastly on the dolls’ arms she was painting now. But the work gave her mind nothing to hold to. It kept swinging away to Cassie. She’d wanted to set some bulbs this fall for flowers come spring, but—; she’d think of the next rent paying day, and from that her mind would jump back to the last letter she’d had from her mother. Mostly, she had written complaints of Reuben: he’d run off to a play party given for some wil
d soldier boys who’d been spared to come home when her Henley was dead, and there’d been banjo music and drinking with some wild dancing, she’d heard. Her mother thought Reuben had had a dram or so, maybe even danced, and she’d written half a page about the sins of the fathers, explaining it could also mean mothers, being visited upon the children.
Her mind swung back to the other boy away from his mother, Joe’s helper. Why did Clovis and Whit want their women gone tonight? She sprang up, getting a smear of red paint on her apron; she had to talk to someone. Who? She thought of the man who had talked over Cassie; he’d looked honest and stern as well as kind. She realized she was out on her stoop with a half painted doll’s right arm gripped in her hand, searching down the alley as if she expected someone. Who? Maybe the gospel woman would come again. She could tell her and she would understand. What would she tell the gospel woman? She didn’t know anything. There wasn’t anything except her own wicked imagination.
Her uneasiness blazed up again like a smoldering fire when Clovis, after eating almost no supper, grew more fidgety than ever, and though he tried to hide it he was like a man waiting for a train. Clytie whined again because Gertie hadn’t taken the trip downtown to the movie that was all for free, but Clovis told her to shut up. “Yer Mom ain’t feelen so good. She’s goen tu go tu bed right after supper?” he said, looking at Gertie.
Gertie nodded, but continued to paint dolls, the hair now, bright yellow above red-spotted cheeks, even after Clytie had gone to bed. She was just thinking of putting the smelly work away, when she heard the slamming of the Meanwell kitchen door, followed by Mrs. Miller’s loud laughter. “There they go, an you could ha been with em, Gert,” Clovis said, half accusingly, then added, as he went for the bottle of turpentine in which he kept the brushes, “I thought you was goen to bed early.”
She only nodded, but when he had put the brushes away he said, turning toward the closet at the end of the hall: “I ain’t sleepy. I think I’ll go keep Whit company.”
Gertie felt the cold sweat on her hands as she pressed them hard against her weary eyes, but her voice seemed level enough, uncaring, as she said, “Miller’ull most likely be with him; he ain’t stayen fer th movie.”
“Miller’s got to stay home with his little youngens,” Clovis said. He took his hat and jacket from the hall closet, and with no more words for her went away.
She took a shower, hot, that put clouds of steam in the little bathroom and made water drip from the windows. The sound of the shower as always drowned all other sounds, but seemed like she heard the opening of the kitchen door. Frightened as she had never used to be back home, where doors where never locked, she turned off the shower, stuck her head past the curtain, and listened, but the place was still.
She stayed a long time in the shower; the noise and the water beating on her body somehow made all the world about her, even Clovis, seem farther away. She thought of hills and of home where the yellow poplar leaves would be drifted knee-deep on the ridge sides; the children, Cassie among them, would come running home from school, for with the war over there was school. But Reuben wasn’t going. He didn’t care for school, her mother had written several weeks ago. He’d liked it well enough in the beginning, for she’d been able to do without his work for a few weeks in the summer; then she’d sent him after corn-cutting time for a while, but now after corn-gathering time he didn’t want to go. It was the same letter in which she had hoped Gertie’s father would get some sense and move into town and quit trying to farm. What then for Reuben, Gertie wondered—the coal mines—a factory hand? He wouldn’t like it underground, and he had her hatred of machinery.
There weren’t any answers, and her mind jumped back to Clovis. She looked out the kitchen door when, as was her custom now before going to bed, she made certain it was locked; she saw the square of light from Whit’s kitchen door, and felt better. She felt still better when, while testing the other door, she looked down toward the parking lot and saw Clovis’s car and Whit’s car side by side with another she thought was the tool-and-die man’s.
She went into the bedroom between her kitchen and Sophronie’s where Clovis slept now, and lay as he did since he had been hurt, with her feet instead of her head close to the Meanwell wall. However, she at once came wide awake; the place was stuffy, steamy from the family’s nightly showers, and smelling too of gas and paint from the dolls mixed in with boiled beans and cabbage.
The wall in front of her made a faint glimmering in the dim light from the alley. It was so still behind the wall—too still. Whit’s beer bottle should be clicking on the table; there’d be talk, and maybe the slap of cards as the men played setback. They wouldn’t sit in dead silence.
She got up and stood in the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the window. She heard now, only after much listening, the creak of a chair as if one man sat there.
She fled from the still wall into the living room. A steel pour was coming up; the red light flickered on the drawn blind; the light grew brighter; the block of wood made a faint shadow on the floor, trembling like her own shadow when she had sat by Reuben’s bed. She mustn’t work on the block of wood; though for days she’d been wanting to finish the lifted hand that lingered longingly above the money in the other hand; for it was money—taken—but soon to be given away. The man, then, was Judas; but she didn’t want Judas. Christ had had no money, just his life. Life and money: could a body separate the two?
What had Judas done for his money? Whispered a little, kept still as she did now. No, it wasn’t Judas. She’d bring the face out now, prove to herself it wasn’t Judas. She jerked on the light. She had to work on the block of wood.
Barefooted and in her nightgown, she stepped into the hall, and without looking reached on the top shelf. It was higher than the children could reach, and just above the place where she hung her coat. She had put the knife there on the first day of her coming, for it was a handy place and safe from even Clovis. He never carried a knife, but sometimes he borrowed her own, and he had a heavy hand with a knife; could dull the blade in no time. Once, back home, he’d jerked it up, and used it for a screwdriver, needing a little one.
She rose on tiptoe, reaching still further. The knife had been pushed to the back of the wall was why she couldn’t feel it. She had no memory of laying it there, any more than she remembered putting her clothes over the foot of the bed or the leftover beans in the icebox. It was just that she always did such things.
She snapped on the hall light, got a chair, and stood on it and looked. She searched, at first slowly and methodically, then frantically through all the shelves in the hall, in the rooms where the children were sleeping, the kitchen, the pockets of her clothing. The knife was gone. She hadn’t lost it. She would have noticed, walking around, the weight gone from her pocket. Clovis had borrowed it again. Why? He wanted to use it again as a screwdriver while he and the tool-and-die man worked on some contraption. The tool-and-die man kept a kit of tools in his car; but that was only some talk of the children.
The need of being certain that Clovis had the knife, that he was sitting with Whit on the other side of the wall, became an overmastering torture. She slipped into her coat and shoes, hurried down the steps, and up to Whit’s door.
He must have heard her coming, for he was opening the door before she’d finished knocking. He stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob, and when she pushed to come in to speak to Clovis, it would open no wider than Whit’s shoulders as he stood barring her way, smiling, but not pleased. “What’sa matter?” he asked, whispering.
“My knife—it’s gone.”
“Now who would want a knife at one o’clock in u mornen?” and he laughed his soundless, shivering laughter.
“I want tu whittle,” she said. “Clovis has got it. It wouldn’t be lost. I’ve never lost it or mislaid it in all these years.”
“Yeah,” he said, not moving.
“But ask Clovis has he got it,” she begged, trying to see past him.
He seemed alone. She brushed her hand across her eyes; she wanted to think of her father—of anything. Whit was alone in the place except for the sleeping children. But Clovis had to be there. “Ask him,” she repeated, pushing on the door, but whispering still. Why did she whisper? It was no uncommon thing in the alley to hear people talking at any time of the night, for many worked strange hours.
“Law, woman,” Whit said, not moving, not smiling, “I ain’t got th heart tu wake him. Some baby sitter he is—passed out, him an that tool-an-die man. One’s in my bed, one on the sofa. You’d better git home an git some sleep. That fool Sophronie forgot her key. I’ve got tu be up tu let her in. No need a waken him now.” His voice had grown softer and softer; and now she didn’t hear it at all because the door was shut, soundlessly, with no squeaking like her own.
She was afraid now, and turned off all the lights and sat on the edge of her bed and brushed her hair, and when she could no longer sit still she tiptoed from window to window, watching, listening. The street light on the corner made some light in the alley, but if they came in the other way, hugging the housewall, slipping in on the noise of a train or an airplane, careful to pick a time like now, when there was no steel pour coming off, she could neither see nor hear them.
She stood a long time in the dark living room, her head between blind and glass, but saw nothing, heard nothing, except trains and airplanes.
Weary of these, she sat on the chair at the head of the bed by Sophronie’s kitchen wall. She couldn’t say exactly when it was, but some time very late, she felt more than she heard people behind the wall. Then all at once, and quite loudly, as if the tool-and-die man wanted everyone to hear: “Well, boys, I’d better get on. Thanks for the nice evening, but remember, it wasn’t a Dutch treat—it’s all on me. My notion in th beginning started it, see.” And the door opened.
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