But when I came to the lane it was still, so still that I stood in wonder. Here was the street that never went to bed, all of it, all the night long—tin battling paper in the yard heaps, doors flung and visiting, smells and shadows in a chutney mingle. And now it was like a space where a lane should have been. I heard the leaves scuttling like small animals, and my own breath in my throat. Then, as my eyes widened, the houses pearled toward me out of the dark, chimneys quiet, porches hanging akimbo, like people come upon in the sprawl of sleep, and all the blinds were drawn.
They are at the fair, I thought, but there was no fair that I knew of anywhere near. A street that was a fair to itself, where did such a street go?
I walked down the length of it, almost to the end. Then, behind me, I felt it, a sigh of breath relayed from house to house, a rustle like the great, parting lashes of a single eye, and I knew that they were there.
When I was almost to the last house, I heard a screen door wheeze. I stood in my tracks, behind a bush.
“Louie-lamb?” a woman’s voice said. “’at you, chile, Louie-lamb?”
A man’s whisper came, rough. “Hesh, you. He sure to be in safe somewhere. Crazy, you hesh.”
The door closed. And then I heard the woman’s voice again, outside it, nearer, low on the same words and the same note. I hid my face from it. She came by me and went down the lane, and all the way along it I heard her interval, like a mourning dove, like bubble with a break in it, “Louie-lamb? Louie-lamb?”
Then I cut and ran, running across the remaining fields, almost up to the main line, out into the light, until I no longer felt afraid. I had never had it before, the fear that eats the South; I never had it again. But I remember well how it feels to have to cover the white face, and in justice to Semple I will set it down here. This is how it feels—I remember it yet. I felt—that a dove is a bird that should speak only by day. That, behind their drawn blinds, the demi-people doubled, and became a company of men. And that, wherever their blind was drawn, it was drawn against me.
Yonder, as people said down here, was Johnny’s house; near it, the signal light, steady now until dawn. It must be pleasant, I thought, living under that unwavering glow; waking in the false damp of the mornings here one might take it for the fresh, fogbound glow of coals. I knew the outside of his house the way everyone in Tuscana knew it, all of us coins rubbing together in the same pocket. But the never-entered house of a friend is a special mystery—it is his deshabille. Whatever his truth is, it lies there.
Where I had come to was the old front of what might once have been a stationmaster’s shed—it was blank and closed, all the openings boarded up with faded red planks the railroad must have put there long ago. Someone had shored up the roof with two-by-fours, cross-hatched over the huge, peeling letters of a painted hoarding for cattle feed. In the rear, in front of a number of lean-to’s added on, one to the other, like dominoes, the way the Negroes did, was the yard where I had seen Johnny’s blue-eyed brothers and sisters, in their Hunky pinafores limed with fowl droppings, staring out at passers-by from coveys of dock and creeper, or chattering in their own language at the guinea hens that roosted in the trees.
I walked around the shed to the center lean-to, where light seamed around a door and came faintly through the pocked shade in a window to one side. There were no steps. Standing there, in the quiet smell of the sty, I put my hand on the door. I touched his door, and I could not knock.
I took my money out then, squeezing it for the courage in it. He had never come looking for me so; I knew well that in our afternoons together I served only as a point from which he might go looking for himself. With my fist raised and silent, I thought of how he had never once exchanged with me that precious bit of magic: “Call for me.” Stroking his door with noiseless knuckles, I whispered it aloud. “Call for me.” Standing there on the brink of his mystery, I wanted for once to show him mine.
The whispers we speak so intensely to ourselves, or to the untelepathic air, do they in the end erode us with our own impotence, or sometimes, bearing us forward on the potent scent of ourselves, send us part of the way toward where we reach? When I put my hand back in my pocket, it brushed a small telephone-address book that, phoneless and with nothing to record, I had bought some months before and had carried everywhere with me since. In the pink light shining over my shoulder, I turned its bare, dog-eared pages until I came to one with a tab marked F—for Fortuna. I tore it out and wrote upon it. He might know my writing or guess who it was from. But if he did not come in answer I should never know why; I could pretend to myself that I had given nothing away. So I wrote down my whisper and left it unsigned: Johnny. Call for me.
There was a broken mail basket hanging by a string from a nail in the top of the window frame to the right of the door. I stepped up on the uneven sill of the window and stuck my message on the nail. And as I did so, I saw into the upper pane, where there was no shade. At a table in the foreground, old Frazer, the night watchman, in for a visit during his stint, sat over a cup and saucer. In the oil lamp light his huge, dewlapped face brooded like a hound’s, but everyone knew him for a happy, fluting old man who had come to the end of a snug life with his berth assured, who leaned against the railroad hierarchy—that had brought him so safely to its bottom rung—like an old, moronic prince leaning against his ladder of kings. At the side, in the back, there were dim pallets where the children must be sleeping, and on a rag rug near the table a boy of about seven slept with his arm flung across a glinting toy.
Mrs. Fortuna came out from somewhere in the rear—the old closed-off shed it must be—accompanied by a lantern-chinned man I did not recognize as one of Semple’s crowd. Her earringed moon-face looked the same as it had the times I had seen her on the street, above the same man’s jersey and Mother Hubbard; her feet were bare. The man let his arm drop from her shoulder, strutted across the room in a silent buck and wing, and sat down near Frazer. She brought two more cups and the three of them sat there, sipping; once the man got up and scooped the sleeping boy from the floor, bore him into the rear, and returned with the toy, a harmonica, in his long palm. He put the harmonica to his lips, blowing it without making a sound, and sat down again, shuffling his feet and digging his head to some rhythm he carried inside. Frazer snuffled in his cup and protruded his lips in reverie.
It was the pantomime of people too easy to bother talking, and I noted, too, the easy, mindless way they all touched one another, Johnny’s mother leaning a hand on old Frazer’s nape while she served him, Frazer staying the pot she held, and brushing her a thank-you, the second man picking up the boy or setting straight an askew comb in Mrs. Fortuna’s hair. It was not just male-female touching but something else, something I remembered of Fulham, of certain neighbors there from whom my mother had schooled me away—the congruous group-touch of those so beneath class as to be only people. At home, the higher the caste the more socially untouchable, and it was toward this that people of my mother’s class froze themselves, in the end even exceeding their betters, and losing the other thing forever, even in their awkward, two-by-two congruities of love.
It could not have been long, yet it seemed a long time that I stayed there, a valve in my heart opening and closing, recognizing even then something that would not remain in the picture if I entered, but was only present when seen from outside. Voyeur—that smart sneer of our nerve-triggered salons—we are all voyeurs to the limits of our talent and understanding; even my own habit is only a fortune grown out of bounds. What we see in the scene in the window frame, in the flat across the areaway, in the farmhouse ridden past at twilight, these scenes of people moving with grave, unconscious sweetness at mealtime, impermanence arrested with the holiness of a Vermeer, is the sweet kernel of the human condition—man budded domestic for a moment, on a wild planet. I rested my arms on the window frame and watched them, the reason why I had come forgotten, in this first eavesdropping of so many others to be.
“Get down from there, you
!” A clout from behind knocked me into the darkness below. I fell on my ribs, the wind out of me, my cheek against the greasy earth. Somebody hulked over me, swinging a bucket. I had not caught whose voice it was, and I could not yet see his face. Then, as I raised myself on my elbow, I saw his outline—Johnny’s—looming over me the way it had the day I had asked him the question on the hill. He bent over me, breathing hard.
“I told Lemon, he, any more you peepers sneak around here again—” he said, and then, peering, he knew me. His jaw fell. He stared at me, betrayed.
I could not look straight back at him, the way an animal cannot. When we are accused, guiltless of we know not what, we have still a great nameless flow of residual guilt that rushes toward the accused spot the way blood rushes toward pricked skin.
He reached down slowly and helped me to my feet. “Y’ oughtn’t to listen to Lemon,” he said. Something, no noise, made him glance back at his own house. And when he turned again, he could not look at me.
I knew Lemon and his crowd at school, old as Johnny or older, boys who were thinly tall or stunted, who swaggered tobacco-chew between teeth still green with childish tartar, and claimed the pustules on their cheeks for a more manly disease. As I lagged behind their undercover ferment of talk, I had sometimes got a piece of what half-knowledge I had, but they had never deigned to notice me.
He bit his lip, looking down. “Don’t listen to them,” he said. And even I could hear what else he was saying without saying it. Listen to me.
“I don’t go with Lemon,” I said quickly.
“You mean, you come by here on your own?”
I nodded. I wanted him to ask me why now. I felt happy at his asking me anything.
He stepped back, squinting, the bucket dangling from his hand. “What you come here for?”
I didn’t know what to say. I hung my head, not knowing how to say it.
“What you come for!”
“I—”
“What you come sneaking at the window for? Going to write something on it, maybe?”
I didn’t want to say why I had come now. I wanted to hide it.
He stretched his neck. “Just passing by, whyn’t you knock at the door?”
“I was.” My voice slid higher, in the forgotten alley-tones of home. “I’d got some money, I had. I was going to knock, I was. Quite a bit of money I’d got, and I thought … I’d got three dollars.”
His face looked so queer that I stopped. It moved like a cat’s, separate on its neck. He threw the bucket of swill over me.
It was like being spat upon, although I had never been. But there are postures the spine is born knowing. Reproach for the unknown is one of them.
“Spend your money in niggertown,” he said. “Like Lemon.”
The sour stuff seeped down me, teaching me in one minute the nakedness of clothes. And there on the nail was the note that revealed me. I sprang for it.
I had it in my hand when he jumped me. We rolled over and over, kicking and tearing, sobbing deep in our chests with the grim joy of having found the adversary at last.
He was kneeling on my chest when he read it. I lay on my back, heaving slower, the arm that he had twisted outflung. Soft air currents in the night touched my eyelids, that all but closed in sleep. Filth from my hair trickled into my mouth, but I did not move; it had the taste of justice. It was he who bent and wiped it away.
“Stay here,” he whispered, and went off into the dark. When he came back he had a bucket of water and a cloth. He stood me up and cleaned me off like a brother.
“Turn around,” he said. When I had my back to him he spoke, dipping and wringing the cloth. “They been writing stuff on the windows—know what I mean?”
I nodded, head down.
“Pick times when I ain’t here,” he said. “Sure ’nough don’t pick times when I’m here.” The rag paused, continued its work. “Store closed early tonight. Semple has places ’round town I got to go for him. He let me take his car.” I heard the note of pride, but more than that the way he was telling me things in the present, the way he had never done before. “Runs like a dream, she does,” he said.
He mopped the back of my jeans. “Brung it back for him, walk home slow, never thinking anybody try any that stuff tonight. Ain’t even been in the house yet—come round the corner, and I seen you.” His hand paused again, and I felt the water run down my calf to my heel. “Nobody comes here for me, see,” he said. “Took you for one of them, see what I mean?”
I turned so that I could look down on him as he squatted there, dangling the rag. “What I meant—about the money—”
“Forget it.” He found a spot on my sneaker.
“What I—”
“I said forget it.” He wet the spot down carefully. “Your maw—she in on your asking me up to your house?”
I had forgotten her. “She’s gone off,” I muttered.
He looked up. “For good?”
That is the way I remember his face best—when he looked up and said that. There was all his life and what he came from—in the way he said that. And it was odd how I wanted to be able to say yes to him, the way an aggrieved child sometimes tells the neighborhood that he is the adopted son of his true parents.
I hesitated, seeing the rising kinship in his face. When I lie, it is not as a fantasist, but to see if I can change life, to play with the protean gap between what is and what might be. And when I tell the truth, it is not for moral reasons, but because I am impelled to see what life does when it is left alone.
“She and my uncle—they went to Memphis for a week,” I said.
“Oh.” He flipped the bunched rag from hand to hand. He had not, then, been asked into a house after all, as the Nellises had once asked him—as shone always in his mind, like their evening light. Yet when he stood up, he put an arm on my shoulder, for what he presumed to be my trouble. “’On’t you fret,” he said. “’On’t you fret on it.”
“I’ve no need to fret,” I said, and it was true, for the moment. We reconsider our troubles, and are helped to bear them, in proportion to their seeming like blessings to others. He had shown me the difference between us.
“They got married today,” I said. “Down at the church, this morning. Maybe you heard.”
“Town had bigger news this morning.” He had withdrawn his arm; he was not too dull to see what I was doing. For now that I had a piece of his mystery, how quick I had been to use it against him, to do to him what I feared from others.
It made me bolder. “The money was to last me the week, but I’ve enough stuff to last me at home. And what I’d in mind was—you and me … we might go down to the café.” Even as I said it, it struck me—how the image had come to be. Not as I had dreamed it—never as one dreams it. But it had come to be.
“Café’s closed,” he said, staring. “Won’t be no trade there tonight, don’t you know that? Your folks crazy, leaving you run loose tonight?”
“I walk late in the backs lots of times.”
“You come through the backs?” He blew out his breath. “Reckon I better see you safe home.”
“How come it’s all right for you?”
He cocked his head, listening. “Shhh. Ain’t that the sound of cars?”
The whistle-stop signal, where we stood, was south of where the town streets ended. The main line ran north-south on the western edge of the town. Behind us to the west were the fields across which I had come, beyond them the backs. All of Tuscana, except for niggertown, lay east of us and the main line, in a hollow bordered on the other side by the state road, four miles away. Between us and the state highway there was a curving dirt road that dead-ended here. To the north, overlooking the town, was the hill where Johnny and I spent our afternoons—one of the small moraines that marched across country here like fragments of aqueducts, marking the dry lizard-trail of some dead tributary of the wide waters farther east. Beyond the hill—in a great easterly semicircle enclosing us all: Tuscana, Charlotte and its sister tow
n of Denoyeville—were the dam sites, breastworks that neither fought us nor defended us, and advanced without guns. On clear nights like this they rose like frozen tidal waves, darker than the sky.
We listened, and heard the sound of motors approaching up the dirt road. There was as yet no surfaced route between us and the dam site. All its exodus was from the other side. Yet, as I listened, I imagined that somehow a detachment of its trucks had overleaped its fortifications, for the sound we heard was in unison—the low humming of motors going at a slow, set pace, on work operation. Then the first car came into view, and close behind it another and another and another, until finally we could see the whole long motley string, moving in low gear, creeping toward us at parade pace—all the cars of Tuscana.
“What they come this way for?” Johnny whispered. “Weren’t due to pass this way.”
“What? Who?” I whispered back. He hushed me, pushing me behind him with a warning hand, then drew me with him inside one of the sheds. Its door hung askew from one hinge, an old kitchen door with a rotted tuft of curtain at its window and no pane.
All the cars were in view now, each pinpointed in the light of another, in a semicircle around us, down the road for as far as we could see. There must have been about forty of them. To own a car was still an eminence in the town at that time, and none of them was new; they were sold and acquired locally as horses had once been, each car with a personality, with a history of the fall and rise of its successive owners, with all its bloodlines clear in the mind of the town. As they rounded us, I thought I recognized farm trucks seen week after week at the Friday market, others that were a familiar sight on the streets, although I could not name their owners, and a few that I was sure I had never seen before, that might have come from Denoyeville or Charlotte. I recognized the Baptist minister’s car, and the doctor’s.
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