I followed the prints, moving quickly because they were clear. In a few minutes I came to the edge of a clearing and saw a man in the center of it, naked to the waist, despite the driving snow and horrible cold, building a cairn of giant triangular boulders. I knew that it was Moses Washington. I watched him from cover, seeing the rippling of muscle as he lifted the massive rocks, hearing him grunt as he clumsied them into place. When he finished he stepped back and admired his handiwork, and then he brought up his foot and proceeded to kick the cairn apart, sending the rocks avalanching down in disarray. I said nothing, made no sound, gave no hint of my presence, but nevertheless, when the destruction was complete, he turned and looked at me and laughed, and then he vanished into the woods.
I went forward then, and put the gun down, and tried to lift one of the rocks. I found that it was not at all heavy. And so I began to rebuild the cairn. It was amazingly easy; all the stones fit together in a sensible and logical way, and in only a moment I had finished. But it did not look quite right. And then I realized that since the stones were all triangular, they would all fit together logically and easily, and so I took them down and put them up another way, and when done I took them down and put them up again….
Then I had seen that it would go on like that. Then I had tried to wake. But I could not. Something had shackled me in the dreaming state, and I could not open my eyes. The escape for me had not been up into wakefulness but down into deeper slumber; not out of the dreams but into them. There, at the bottom of it all, there was only one dream. Not even a dream; just an all-encompassing sensation of icy coldness, and a visual image of total white. No sound. No smell. No feeling really; just the cold. That was the dream, the coldness and the whiteness growing to envelop me, like an avalanche of snow, deceptive in slow motion, covering me, smothering me. And I could not stop it. I could not free myself. I could not wake up. Not on that night. And not on any of the nights that followed. Of course, I would awaken, sooner or later. But never spontaneously, never of my own accord. Someone—or something—had to wake me. For years it had been Bill, coming across the room and touching me lightly and waiting until the cries had stopped, until my eyes were open, and then wordlessly going back to his bed. Then for years there had been no one, and I had acquired a reputation for brilliance simply because I would rather sit up late into the night studying than take the risk of going to sleep. When I had slept, when I had had to sleep, I had religiously set my alarm clock to awaken me at half-hour intervals, and had always found my lodgings near sources of sound—trolley car tracks, truck routes, anything that might provide occasional rescue. And then there had been Judith, who had said nothing when I had explained to her about the alarm clock and the dreams, but who had turned the clock off and slept with her hand on me, to feel the first shivering, and then, even though she was never fully awake herself, waking me and holding me and watching with a hurt, rejected look in her eyes when I would leave the bed and go and mix a toddy too strong and too hot and large enough to sedate a horse, saying nothing, but not understanding that even though I knew she was there to awaken me, even though I had faith in her, I could never really trust her. Because some night she might not feel the shivering, and there would be nothing to wake me, and I would freeze.
That day nothing woke me. Not for long hours, not until I heard the sound of my mother returning. Then I came up out of sleep shivering, the springs beneath me squeaking with each spasm of my body. Eventually I got up and got into the shower, under water as hot as I could make it. Eventually I stopped shivering, and I got out and dried myself. Then I went back into the bedroom and dressed in clothes out of the dresser and the closet, some Bill’s, some mine. And then I went down the back stairs into the kitchen.
“I made the calls,” she said.
She did not look up from the counter, from the salad she was preparing. I didn’t say anything, simply stood on the lowest step, looking at the condiments arrayed on the thin veneer of Formica she had had cemented over Moses Washington’s maple countertop, noting them carefully, trying to figure out what kind of strange offensive she was mounting.
“John…”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Reverend Williams said we can use the church.”
“Thank him.”
She looked up then, annoyed, a strand of hair falling free from the bun rolled at the nape of her neck. “Don’t you want to know about the arrangements?”
I kept my eyes on the countertop, although I could feel hers on me. “Friends will be received at the E. F. Cohen Funeral Home from seven to nine tomorrow evening. Services will be held at two-thirty Wednesday at Mount Pisgah Methodist Church, with interment following at Mount Ross Cemetery. I leave anything out? Get anything wrong?”
She turned back to the salad. “Just the time,” she said. “Funeral’s at ten. Reverend Williams works the afternoon shift.”
“Good,” I said. “I can catch the afternoon bus.”
She looked at me again then, and I met her eyes. “You can’t stand to be around me a minute longer than you have to, can you?”
“I can’t stand to be here while I have to,” I said.
She looked back at the salad, went on a moment. Then she said, “Well, then, I guess your mongrely friend oughta be mighty grateful to you for coming all this way for his funeral.”
“I didn’t come for his funeral,” I said. “I came because he asked for me. I came because he was dying.”
She didn’t look up; she just moved her hands along in a cupping motion, gathering the salad together. “John,” she said, “would you come if I asked for you?”
“Why?” I said. “Are you dying?”
She said nothing while she scooped the cut-up vegetables into a large wooden bowl. The bowl had been a birthday gift to her from Bill. It had been a project for a Boy Scout merit badge. He had spent hours on it, selecting the log, burning out the inside of it as the African natives had done to make canoes—although he had been taught it was a practice of the local Indians. I watched her use it and wondered what in the name of God she was playing at. She finished scooping and set the bowl aside, wiped her hands on the towel below the sink. Then suddenly she stopped, hands still on the towel, and looked out the window, down over the nearly dark hillside to the softly glowing lights of the town. “We’re all dying,” she said. “I was thinking that today. I remember we used to have a chain. Just like an old bucket brigade, only it was for news. Every woman would have two others to get word to, and each one of them would have two more. That was the old way. When I moved here it had been going on as long as Negroes had been living here. The thing that changed it was the telephone; folks started listening in on the party lines. You’d hear your ring, and soon as you picked up you’d hear the other phones, click, click, click, all down the line. When all the Negroes had telephones, or most did, well, the system just died. And then they brought in the dial phones, and you didn’t know when your neighbor’s phone was ringing anymore, and we needed that old way again. But it was too late then, we’d forgotten how to do it, and we had to get our news like everybody else, over the radio, or in the paper. Just like everybody else.”
“Just like the white folks,” I said. “I’d have thought that would please you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it did please me, while it was happening. Your father used to go down and watch them digging the holes for the poles to bring those phone lines up on the Hill here, and he’d get so mad. He’d come home mad. I’d say to him, ‘Moses, that’s progress.’ And he’d say, ‘Vette, that’s white man’s progress. It’s colored man’s death.’ And I never knew what he meant, because when he passed, the phones weren’t in yet, and everybody heard, and when your brother died, the whole County heard, but today, they said they couldn’t run the announcement in the paper until day after tomorrow, and so I tried to get through to folks on the phone, and I thought to myself, there was a time you could have told everybody you needed to tell by talking to two people, but n
ow you have to make twenty phone calls, and you have to look up the numbers in a book, and those poles marching up the Hill weren’t progress, they were death. Just like Moses said.”
I stared at her. Not because of what she was saying—she was perfectly capable of saying anything if she thought it would help her get what she wanted—but because she meant it. I could tell from her body; she had somehow drawn herself together, like a caterpillar near a flame.
“The Hill’s dead, Johnny,” she said. “I didn’t mind making twenty phone calls. I minded that there were only twenty to make, and half of them were outside of town. You know, we don’t even ring the church bell anymore—hardly anybody lives close enough to hear it. We don’t have a Sunday school anymore, because there aren’t any young children to come to it. There aren’t enough people to have fights at quarterly conference. We wouldn’t even have a preacher if Reverend Williams hadn’t come to work at the shoe factory. There’s not enough work for young people, and not enough young people, and they move away….” She stopped suddenly, straightened, stepped away from the window, went to the stove and turned on the broiler. “Dinner’ll be ready in a few minutes,” she said. She went to the refrigerator and took out a jar of mayonnaise, came back to the counter and began to mix it into the salad.
I came the rest of the way down the steps and sat down at the table, watching her. I realized that I had not seen her in a long time; years. And that I had made a stupid assumption: that she would not have changed. In most ways she had not. And yet there was something different about her. I wondered what it could be, what could have caused it, what it would mean. I knew it would not mean that much; it couldn’t because she was doing the same old things. Or had been. I watched her mix mayonnaise into the salad, knowing she hated mayonnaise, knowing she knew I hated mayonnaise, and I wondered.
I was still wondering when she had set the meal before me: a slab of fresh prime round steak, broiled medium-well; a potato baked until the meat was soft and fleshy, with a pat of hand-churned butter inserted when the potato was not yet done, so that the flesh was a golden yellow throughout; a loaf of bread, fresh-baked, and beside it a pound chunk of the sweet butter, warmed until it was soft enough to spread. The salad was not as perfect as the rest, but Italian tomatoes, Bermuda onions, and romaine lettuce are not common to the northern Appalachian region in March; she had done well to find them at all, and they were, to be fair, fresh enough. It was a superb meal. The result of much effort and not inconsiderable expense, and a high degree of concern. It was an expression of something—of a desire for some kind of reconciliation, perhaps even of love. Or so one would have thought just from looking at it, without knowing the history of it. But I did know that history, and so I could recognize it as another one of her little stratagems, or part of one; an emotional pincers movement devised to encircle the unwary. Well, I was wary. But I did not know what the objective was.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, as she set the food before me. As she sat down across from me, behind a cheaper cut of meat, a smaller potato. Her voice seemed higher than usual. “Did you have anything to eat today?”
“No,” I said. “I slept.”
“Good,” she said. “You’re hungry then.”
“I’m hungry,” I said. Warily. She was planning something. And the meal was central to it; she wanted me to eat it. She seemed to want me to like it. I didn’t understand it at all.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Fine,” I said. “I slept just fine.” I took a bite of the steak. It was tender and full of flavor, but it was done too well for me—I like mine rare. “How was work?”
“Real good. Busy, but not too busy. You know. Is your steak all right?”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It’s not too rare, is it?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“I could put it back in for a minute….”
“It’s fine. Perfect. Wonderful. Dandy. Okay?”
She didn’t say anything, just looked hurt and chewed her food. I ate silently then too, chewing the steak, slicing at the potato, pecking cautiously at the salad, trying to get as little of the mayonnaise as possible, trying to figure it out. She had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a favorite meal, and there had to be a reason, and it had to be a strange reason. Because it was not my favorite meal. It was Bill’s.
“That’s Hellman’s on the salad,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“John, I called the insurance. Or I tried to; the company’s out of business.”
“You tell Cohen not to worry about getting paid. I’ll write him a check before I leave.”
“You don’t have to; Mr. Scott said he’d be happy to pay for it.”
I looked up at her. “You know what to tell him about that.”
“John, he only wants—”
“You know what to tell him about that.”
“All he wants—”
“I don’t give a damn what he wants. He turned Bill’s funeral into a Goddamned three-ring circus, and he’s not going to do it again. You tell him to take his money and use it for a suppository.”
“How’s your potato?” she said.
“What?”
“Your potato. It’s not too firm, is it?”
“No,” I said, “no, it’s just perfect.”
“Oh,” she said, getting up suddenly. “I forgot.” She went to the refrigerator, came back carrying a pint of sour cream. “Here,” she said. She opened the container and put it before me, and then resumed her seat. “You have to bury things sometime, John,” she said. “All right, you think what he did about Bill was wrong. He didn’t think so….”
“He still doesn’t,” I said.
“All right, maybe he doesn’t. But that’s not a reason to keep him from doing what is right.”
“Nothing that bastard wants to do is right,” I said. I sounded angry, and I was angry, but mostly I was confused. Because the moves made perfect sense for her—a frontal attack with the steak and baked and tossed, and when the main source of resistance had been encountered, dig in and bring up the sour cream. What didn’t make sense was the fact that it was Bill’s meal, and she expected me to eat it and then give in to Scott.
“At least talk to him about it. Talk to him.”
That was it.
“What the hell do I want to talk to Scott for?”
She didn’t say anything; she just reached for the spoon and the sour cream and started to ladle it onto my potato. I reached out and stopped her. “I don’t want any of that,” I said.
“What?”
“I don’t want any of that. I don’t like sour cream.”
“Why, John, you always loved sour—” She stopped. Looked at the sour cream, then at me.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
And then I realized how simple the explanation was, how simple and how unthinkable: she had made a mistake. She had calculated her strategy perfectly, but she had made the wrong meal—or she had thought she was cooking for the wrong son. It was almost funny. I let go of her hand, watched it drop lifelessly to the table. “I hate sour cream,” I told her. “I hate mayonnaise too.”
Suddenly, for the first time I could recall, she looked old. Her cheeks formed little pouches, and her mouth seemed just a little loose. But she picked up the spoon. “Then I’ll have some,” she said.
“You hate sour cream too,” I said.
But she paid no attention, and smeared it all over her potato. She took two bites, her eyes staring at me, hard and defiant. And then she stood up quickly and turned and mounted the stairs. I heard her steps as she walked into her bedroom, the creak of springs as she lay across the bed. And then there were smaller creaks; her body was shaking.
I listened to them for long minutes before I pushed the carcass of the meal away from me and mounted partway up the stairs. She heard me coming; the creakings stopped.
“All right,” I said, keeping my voice soft, but knowing she would
hear. “All right. I’ll go and see the bastard.” I had turned and gone back down the stairs then, to get out the pot and brew the coffee.
The average commentator on the manners, mores, politics, and structure of society is, as a rule, too easily confused by the trappings of power. He assumes, for example, that a man’s influence is indicated by his position, or his wealth, or his connections in business, completely ignoring—or choosing to ignore, for reasons of hypocrisy or deception—the awesome effect of tennis and bridge partnerships, school groups, marriages, clandestine affairs, and the interpersonal bonds forged by mutual experience. He is even more confused by surface appearances that pertain to cities and towns. Importance is often confused with population or de jure factors. Washington, D.C., for example, is the capital of the United States, and many observers, especially foreign observers, have come to speak of America as “Washington,” an error that may explain many a diplomatic gaffe. An observer who would know the true state of things must rely on more subtle indicators. He must look at the map, for example, and note that cartographers habitually build a dimension beyond latitude and longitude into their charts; they grade roads according to their surface and size, a fair indicator of importance of the towns which those roads connect. They also provide graphic indications of the size of cities, from large, sprawling masses for cities of size to tiny open circles for towns of none. (This is not a fact lost on those who inhabit truly minor towns—they speak continuously of getting their hamlet on the map.) But even these indirect indicators can lead one astray, and to truly judge the impact of a given area on a total society, one must look at the lines of communication: the number of major highways, the number and size of airports, the number of AM radio stations (FM stations, because of their frequency, being limited in range), the national circulation of the newspapers. Perhaps the best indicator of regional importance is provided by the telephone company: the greater the importance of a locale, the smaller the number of digits that are required to dial beyond it. From the city of New York, one can dial any point in the continental United States by using only ten digits. In the city of Philadelphia, which is of slightly lesser importance, one must prefix those ten digits with an additional “1.” From the County, the process of dialing long distance is interminable. In order to call Judith I dialed area code and local number, prefixing it all with a four-digit “direct distance dialing number,” a total of fourteen digits. I reached a machine.
Chaneysville Incident Page 20