Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “He paid his insurance, you know that. I’ll call the agent this morning. I can do it from work.”

  I stared at her again. “Why do you want to do it? You didn’t give a damn about him when he was alive.”

  “He helped build the house I live in. He was my husband’s friend. He was my son’s friend. I didn’t want to rub elbows with the man, and I won’t say I’m going to cry a tear over his smelly carcass, but I’m not so quick to forget I maybe owe him a thing or two.”

  I didn’t say anything; I just looked at her.

  She sighed. “You want more coffee?”

  I nodded. She poured it, sugared it, added too much milk. That was the way she had done it the first time she had let me drink coffee. It had been a rather momentous morning; the two of us in the kitchen as always and then suddenly she, with no fanfare, with an almost elaborate casualness, putting a cup beside her mug and pouring it half full. She meant it as an entry into her world, and it might have worked had it not been for the fact that, long before, Old Jack had initiated me into manhood with a sip of a far more potent brew. But she did not know that, and it did not seem to me then that I had to choose one or the other, and so I sipped my coffee-milk elaborately, flaunting it in front of Bill, and floated off to school, swollen with my new status. Predictably, I stood up to some taunt and got into a fight, for once giving as good as I got. They called her to the school. She chastised me in the principal’s office, while that gentleman looked on in stern satisfaction.

  “You’re going to be persona non grata if you keep up this fighting,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” I mumbled.

  “Speak up when you talk to me,” she snapped. “And show some respect. Do you know what persona non grata means?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  The principal leaned forward.

  “It means that people don’t want you. It means they won’t talk to you or be with you. It means there won’t be a soul you can trust. Folks won’t have anything good to say about you.”

  The principal sat back, looking relieved; he hadn’t known what it meant, either.

  I had been staring at the floor, because it was impossible to look her in the eye when she spoke that way and looking anywhere else but down would have been a sign of impertinence. But her words kindled something inside me, and I raised my head and looked her straight in the eye. “Well, then, I guess I’m person-whatever-it-is already. Because that boy called me a nigger. So I might as well fight.”

  For a moment she stared at me, speechless, and then she brought her hand around in a long sweeping curve that ended just above my left ear. The room spun. My head rolled on my neck, swinging up towards the ceiling. Somehow I stayed on my feet, brought my head under control, forced my eyes to focus. She stood looking at me, waiting to see what I would do. I smiled at her. She hit me again. In the moment before the blow landed I saw the look on her face; it was cold, determined, almost murderous. And then the world spun. I literally saw stars. But I stayed on my feet, stumbling a little, yet somehow keeping my balance. I did not look at her face again; I kept my head down.

  “He won’t be gettin’ into no more fights,” I heard her say, through the slowly fading ringing in my ears. “If it’s all right, I just take him on home and clean him up, send him back this afternoon.”

  “That’s fine,” the principal said.

  She had turned to me, tugging at my collar points. “Let’s get you home and clean you up.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  We left the school and walked the half block to where she had parked the car. I got in and sat silently, staring straight ahead. I ached. They had been tough fights. She got in, started the engine. Then she turned to me. “John, don’t you forget, don’t ever forget, that white people are the ones that say what happens to you. Maybe it isn’t right, but that’s just exactly the way it is. And so long as you’re going to their school, so long as they’re teaching you what you need to learn, you have to be quiet, and careful, and respectful. Because you’ve got your head in the lion’s mouth. You understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I had said.

  She rose from the table and took her mug to the far end of the kitchen and set it on the windowsill while she unshipped the iron and the board. She sipped absently at the coffee while she waited for the iron to heat. “It almost seems like I ought to be going up to shake your brother awake. That boy sure did love his sleep.” She took a sip from her mug, then tested the iron with the moistened tips of her fingers. She pulled a blouse from the laundry basket by the door, spread it on the board, took another sip from the mug, set it down, and began to iron. She would, I knew, forget about the coffee. She always did. She would get engrossed in whatever it was and forget the half-full cup, and when she wanted more coffee, she would make a cup of instant, eventually leaving that one too somewhere half drunk. Hours, sometimes even days, later she would find a cup and take it up again, never minding the fact that the coffee was cold now. That’s what she was trying to do now—take it up and carry on like it was only cold coffee.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He sure did love his sleep.”

  She looked up at me, still ironing. “I…” she said, and stopped.

  “You what?” I said, realizing my slip as soon as I said it: I had given her permission to say whatever it was that she was going to say.

  “I always wish we could have talked more about your brother. About him dying.” She did not look up. The iron moved slowly and evenly across the board.

  “There wasn’t anything to talk about. He died.”

  “And you still hate for it.”

  I saw the trap then. “Not now,” I told her. “I’m tired now.”

  “Now is the only time. You’ll be on that bus and we’ll never talk. Because the only thing that brought you back here was that old man. You leave now and I’ll never see you again.”

  I looked up at her. There wasn’t any pleading or pain in her eyes, and the iron moved as evenly as ever: it had been only a statement of fact. “What,” I said, “do you care?”

  “You’re my son. The only child I’ve got left.”

  “That’s not my fault,” I said.

  “Meaning it’s mine.” She did not look up then, either.

  “Not now,” I said.

  “Well, that is what you mean, isn’t it?”

  She was winning again, and I knew it, and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t keep myself from putting the coffee down and saying, “Fact: when he left me he had a thousand dollars and a bus ticket to Montreal. Fact: he came here in the dead of night to say goodbye to you. Fact: in the morning he was down there in town, and they were so good to him they let him enlist. Fact: he went off and died. Summary: he left me to live and he left you and died. Now, Mother, exactly what was it you wanted to talk about?”

  “I guess I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. The iron moved over the cotton blouse in slow smooth even strokes.

  “Well, that’s just as well. Because I don’t.”

  “And you don’t want to.”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot, no.”

  “Don’t you talk like that in my house,” she snapped. “I raised you right; I raised you to show more respect. And let me tell you, what he wanted to do was wrong. Running away! That boy had a future, and he was ready to throw it all away, running off to Canada….”

  “Good future he’s got now.”

  “You don’t know. There were good people in this town that wanted to see him do well. And he still had a chance. You don’t know how I begged Mr. Scott. They were going to put that boy in jail. Son of mine in jail. So I begged him. Pleaded with him. And so they gave my boy a chance….”

  “Yeah,” I said. “To die for them.”

  “To do right,” she said. “To do his duty.”

  “The only thing I want to know,” I said, “is did you talk him into giving up, or did you just turn him
in?”

  She was silent. And still. I waited, and presently I saw a curl of smoke rising from the blouse; her hand no longer moved the iron. I didn’t say anything: I let it burn. After a moment she became aware of it. She moved slowly and deliberately, without haste or panic, lifting the iron and carrying the smoldering cloth to the sink, dousing it with water. She held the burnt blouse up to the light, looked at it. “I have to go to work,” she said. She had put the blouse down and vanished up the back stairs. For a few minutes I had heard her rattling around up there. I listened to her footsteps moving across the floor as she went about the business of dressing. I listened carefully, waiting for her to go into her powder room, where she had always kept the keys to the car. Finally I heard her steps going in there, caught the faint jingle of keys. And then I knew that I had perhaps touched her just a little; I heard her come down the stairs at the front of the house. The front door slammed. The car started, idled for a moment, and then churned away, down the Hill.

  I sat there for a minute or two, not doing anything, just sitting and looking out the kitchen window at the plot of dead earth that had been Bill’s garden. Originally, it had been Moses Washington’s private truck farm. At unspecified hours he would descend from the attic and go out there and tend the vegetables, and a lot of the time Bill and I would be pressed into service to stand around holding his hoe or his rake, or to pick rocks out of the soil, or to weed around the plants. Whatever it was, we had never done it quite right, and he had not been averse to telling us about it in no uncertain terms. The worst part of it had been that there was never any end in sight; the ordeal ended when Moses Washington grew tired, and he was tireless. So we had hated the garden, hated the vegetables that came from it. And the year after his death, as spring approached, I had found myself looking forward to a summer free of it. But Bill had not.

  As soon as the snow had melted he began to prepare the ground, hauling manure in Moses Washington’s old wheelbarrow, hoeing with his hoes, raking with his rakes. He begged or borrowed or stole his seed from God knows where. He planted and tended with a devotion that verged on obsession; he was nine years old and driven. Daniel and Francis laughed at him and called him “the farmer.” The WH&FMS ladies had clucked their heads sadly and prayed for him, sharing the opinion, voiced by Aunt Lydia Pettigrew—who, despite being childless, understood children—that what he was doing was showing how much he missed his daddy. Even Old Jack, who had paid a call on the plot one afternoon when my mother was not around, and who had inspected the plants closely (which was something nobody else had bothered to do), had a reaction; he grinned. And wouldn’t say why. And he was probably the only person who was not surprised when the plants matured into chrysanthemums and marigolds and violets; Bill had converted Moses Washington’s truck farm into a flower garden. It was his kind of revenge, and he had exacted it in full every Saturday, by taking a bouquet of whatever happened to be blooming across the Hill to the cemetery and laying it on Moses Washington’s grave.

  I looked at the garden and wondered what he had thought when he did that, week after week, year after year, and, not for the first time, wondered if perhaps I was not wrong about his motives; if perhaps he really meant it as a tribute. But I couldn’t afford to believe that he had been that good—I hated them enough already.

  After a while I got up and went to the stove and poured the rest of the coffee into my cup. I had meant to sip it, but I found myself gulping it down, hot, black; felt it scalding down my gullet and slamming into my belly and turning my stomach sour. I turned the stove off then, and put the cup in the sink. I realized I was tired. But I was not ready to risk sleeping, or even to go upstairs in that house. Not yet. And so I went into the dining room.

  Nobody knows where Moses Washington got the design for his house, although according to one apocryphal tale, Miss Winifred Brainard, the old-maid librarian, had looked up one day from the book she was checking for obscene language to find him standing over her waving a library card and demanding to see back numbers of House Beautiful, whereupon she had fainted dead away. The story might have been true, but it was also true that Moses Washington got his design from no such magazine. Most likely he got it out of his head. The lower floor was a claustrophobe’s dream: there were no less than seven exits. There was rampant duplication: two entrances to every room, making it possible to make a complete tour of either floor without backtracking; two fully equipped bathrooms, the first and second built on the Hill (also the last and next to last); two staircases, front and back—a schizophrenic could have lived in the place without ever having to face his alter ego. A paranoid would have found it equally comfortable, for although there were no hallways, and each room opened directly into the next, none of the doorways was in line with any of the others, and since none of the rooms was a simple rectangle, but rather a combination of rectangular shapes, there were nooks and crannies all over the place which you had to actually enter to see into.

  Those who saw it interpreted it—if they got beyond simply thinking it was all very weird—as an egomaniacal expression by a sick personality. It was far from that. Moses Washington, for some reason known only to himself, after nearly forty years of telling society to go to hell, had decided to come down from the mountains and live in society; something had to contain him, to make it possible for other people to live with him, and for him to live with them. So he had built a house with lots of exits and plenty of places to hide, and he had reserved, for his own use, a place that had to be entered by a folding staircase that he could pull up after him. That he had surely needed. Because in the lower portion of the house he made the ultimate concession to society and to his wife: he had built a parlor and a dining room so that people from outside could be entertained.

  They rarely had been. For while Moses Washington had made concessions for the comfort of guests, he had never gone out of his way to invite any, or to make those who were invited by his wife particularly welcome. And so during his lifetime the parlor knew no abundance of visitors, most potential callers having been discouraged by the story of how he, neatly dressed in pinstripe and tie, had joined his bride’s first—and only—tea party, taking a seat in the fragile-looking Queen Anne chair that had been the pride of his wife’s mother, his bulk threatening to turn it into kindling at any second, and sipping tea from one of his wife’s frail china cups, the delicate arch of his pinkie seeming obscene. He had joined in the conversation—had taken it over, rather, since everybody else had ceased speaking as soon as he had come through the door—asking, in a polite, gentle, and totally inoffensive voice, the preacher’s opinion of certain Christian assumptions concerning the afterlife. It had been obvious to all present—except the preacher—that the questions were stupid, offensive, and obscene, all the more so for coming out of the mouth of such a well-known heretic; as usual, Moses Washington was making fun, and those present had taken rapid and outraged leave, as angry over the fact that Moses Washington had not actually done anything as over what he had done. Finally, the only persons left in the parlor had been Moses Washington and the preacher—who had seemed curiously insensitive to his personal and professional humiliation—who now had their jackets off and their ties loosened and were engaged in spirited debate, the hostess having retired to an upstairs bedroom to cry her eyes out in frustration. The experience had totally befuddled the preacher, everybody agreed; nobody blamed him when, afterwards, he was heard to say that Moses Washington was, in terms of theological understanding, far more advanced than most of his parishioners. But at the next annual conference, they had had him moved.

  Nobody much came visiting after that. In fact, the only times I could recall the parlor being used was during the infrequent visits of whatever minister the Central Jurisdiction of the Methodist Episcopal Church had seen fit to punish with an assignment to the Hill, and on the first Wednesday of every August, when the annual rotation made it my mother’s turn to host the monthly meeting of the Women’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society�
��obviously, nobody felt comfortable visiting in Moses Washington’s house unless he was under the auspices of God Almighty. The preachers, at that, had always been a little frightened. The WH&FMS ladies, on the other hand, had been fearless, the courage no doubt born of their personal bulk and relatively formidable numbers. Moses Washington probably could have taken them, but it would have been a costly victory, and on the occasions of the meetings he had stayed not only away from the parlor but away from the house—from that side of the Hill, in fact.

  But even the WH&FMS ladies did not go into the dining room, not even after Moses Washington was dead; when my mother served food to them, or to other guests, she served it in the parlor, buffet style. Nobody, not even family members, had ever eaten a meal in Moses Washington’s dining room.

  Which is not to say it went unused. No space that fell inside my mother’s orbit ever went unused, or, at least, unfilled. She regarded such space as territory ripe for conquest, and she proceeded to take it in the same way she conquered the minds of those who opposed her; she piled things in it. Anything. It didn’t matter what, just so long as it wasn’t anything big, anything anybody could reasonably object to. She would pile and pile, a little bit at a time, until one day there wasn’t any space anymore, and the original shape of anything that had been there was lost under the piles. It was an effective technique, and over the years she had managed to pretty much conquer every clear space in the house. She had failed on only one occasion; then she had been piling things on the front stairs which led from Bill’s and my bedroom down into the parlor. The assault had got pretty far advanced; Bill and I were small and able to slip through the space she left for a long time, and were motivated to do so as long as possible, to avoid Moses Washington. But eventually we had been forced to use the back stairs, and he had noticed the shift in the traffic pattern. I don’t recall him asking a single question; probably he knew her well enough to figure out what was going on. Or perhaps he had just gone to look. At any rate, we had heard the sound and had come running just in time to see an avalanche of odds and ends of cloth and sewing patterns and three years’ worth of David C. Cook Sunday School literature sliding down to drift on the parlor floor. We had peeked cautiously around the corner and seen him there, his face impassive, not a sound escaping his lips, his heavy shoes mopping up what was left of her occupying forces. And later we had seen her, just as silently, clearing the mess off the floor.