She turned away from him and went into the kitchen again. Little Lee said softly, “Mama, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing, hon. Drink your milk.” It was real milk tonight, not one can of Silver Cow condensed diluted with four cans of water. That and the pork chops and an icebox full of food had been bought with the money Andy had brought home on Wednesday, and there was both money and food left over. Lee McCory smiled at her children. “Daddy’s just excited about his new job.”
Danny’s eyes were enormous, filled with question and doubt. “Is Daddy gonna be paid every week?” he asked. Lee felt a surge of pride in her son. He talked just fine for a three-year-old.
“Yes, honey. He’s going to be paid every week.” Lee reached for the pork chops, served herself one, then spooned green beans into her plate and broke herself a piece of golden cornbread. “Daddy has a good job now.”
“And he ain’t drinkin’ beer,” Little Lee said solemnly.
Lee flinched, but Andy, in the living room, gave no sign of having heard his daughter. “No,” Lee whispered.
It was true: Andy had come home sober Thursday, had remained sober Friday, and then all day today. He was a binge drunk, but a constant drinker. Not for years had his breath been free of alcohol for three days straight. And there was the money... .
“It’s a good job your daddy’s got,” Lee said softly to her three- and four-year-old. “He’s gonna have money every week, and we gonna buy you some new shoes and some clothes and maybe a coat apiece before it gets cold.” And food for your stomachs, and when you get sick a real doctor and not just a trip to the drugstore to beg some aspirin on credit, she added silently. Poor babies, you deserve better than your daddy and me. I wish —
He was in the doorway. “Whyn’t you tell me supper was on the table?”
Hurt brimmed in her eyes. “Set down,” she said. “I’ll fix you a plate.”
Andy pulled one of the mismatched ladder-back chairs out from the table, slumped into it. Lee, her own food cooling on the plate, got up to put meat and vegetables before her husband. “Got any coffee?” he asked.
They had inherited the stove, a chipped white Magic Chef gas burner, from the last occupant of their rented house. Lee remembered times when they ate cold food because Andy had drunk up the money intended to replenish the propane tank out back. Well, now they could have it filled regular, she thought as she turned to the stove. A dented tin coffeepot rested on it, its Bakelite handle broken to two stubs. Wrapping her hands in a couple of dishcloths, Lee lifted the pot and poured a cup of coffee for her husband. He took it without acknowledgment and drank deeply. Lee sat back down, looking at him. He could always do that, she thought. Always drink down coffee that would scald anybody else, always eat the hottest red pepper without even getting water in his eyes.
Andy McCory hunched over his plate, methodically shoveling food into his mouth, his jaw working like something mechanical. Around a mouthful of pork chops, he muttered, “Gonna go out tonight.”
Lee nodded. Little Lee, looking at her daddy, began to cry.
Andy wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “What’s the matter with her?” he growled, nodding at his daughter.
Lee reached a protective hand to her little girl’s neck. “She’s just tired out,” she told her husband. “She’s all right.”
Andy grunted, gulped coffee. Silence lay heavy in the kitchen until he pushed back from the table, belched, and got up. “Goin’ to town,” he announced.
Lee followed him to the living room. “Where are you goin' to be?” she asked him.
Andy scowled and shook his head.
Lee put her hand on his, stopping him from opening the door. “Andy, don’t. Stay here.” Her husband paused under her touch, but then he pulled away.
“Gotta go,” Andy said, his voice genial as she remembered it being years before, in the days when he still wore his army uniform around town. “Come on, move.”
She looked into his face. “Andy, I — maybe if you stayed home we could let Danny sleep on a pallet in the living room tonight. Maybe you and me could — you know.”
He grinned at her, put both his hands on her waist, and picked her up. He was stronger than he looked, really terribly strong, and he set her aside as if she had been no heavier than one of the mannequins in the Bon Ton window downtown. “Be back before too late.” He winked. “We’ll talk about it then.” He opened the door, froze — there was no other word for it, he simply froze, as if suddenly locked into position — then turned to look over his shoulder, that dull-crafty look in his eyes. “Gotta clean up the theater,” he said. “Promised Mr. Badon I’d get the floors all clean tonight. Gotta be ready Monday for the show. You remember that?”
Lee nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Where’m I gonna be?”
“Andy — ”
“Goddamn it, where’m I gonna be, woman?”
Her lips seemed numb. “At the theater,” she mumbled. “Cleanin’ the floors.”
“At’s right. You remember that in case — you just remember that, now.”
The door closed. Behind Lee, a small voice said, “Mama?”
It was Danny, standing there hand in hand with Little Lee. Lee sank to her knees, spread her arms. Her children ran to be enfolded, buried their faces warm against her throat. Muffled, Danny’s voice again: “Mama?”
Lee rocked back and forth. “What is it, hon?”
Danny pushed away, tilted his pudgy face up toward hers, his fine coppery hair adrift over his forehead. “Mama,” he said, still trying to find the words to express his thoughts right, “who was he?”
“Who was who, hon?” Lee asked, the numb feeling spreading to her cheeks.
“That man.”
Lee tried to smile. It felt like a grimace on her face. “Hon, that was your daddy. You know that. It was your daddy.”
Danny’s eyes looked stricken. His lip trembled, and his face fell apart in a terrified wail. Little Lee joined him. For a frantic moment, Lee McCory tried to shush them: then, for reasons unknown even to her, she joined in, crying as loudly, as forlornly, as the little boy and girl.
5
Brother Odum Tate paid twenty-four dollars a week for his room and board. From time to time he bought small things — a newspaper, undershorts from the dime store, a sack of peppermint candy to soothe a throat torn raw by gospel. He put whatever money was left over in a sock, and he kept the sock in the suitcase under his bed.
Now the bills and silver were spread out on top of the bed. Tate had stacked the singles in piles of ten, had spread out the larger denominations. Stacks of dimes and quarters made dollars, stacks of nickels made half-dollars, of pennies dimes. He counted, counted again. One hundred and four dollars in bills; eleven dollars in silver and copper; thirty-three cents left over. A hundred and fifteen dollars and thirty-three cents. He was richer than he had imagined. Twenty dollars could take a man a long way on a Greyhound, north or south or west.
Tate had been sitting on the edge of the bed. He got up and went to the window of his bedroom. There, to the west, behind Rainey Hill, the sun had set, leaving the sky deep purple, shading to pink. In such skies he saw, or imagined he saw, the face of God from time to time. Tonight it just looked empty.
“Oh, God,” he said, his lips barely moving. “Tell me what to do. What would You have me to do?” The big Bible rested atop a chipped blond chest of drawers, beside Tate’s pocket watch, key, handkerchief, and wallet. The preacher reached to pull the chain on his hanging bulb, flooding the room with sudden yellow light. Then he stood the Bible on its spine, let it fall open.
He cast his eye on the page, trusting to God to provide guidance. He read:
1 The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.
2 For the transgression of a land many are the princes thereof: but by a man of understanding and knowledge the state thereof shall be prolonged.
3 A poor man that oppresseth the poor is like a swee
ping rain, which leaveth no food.
4 They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend without them.
5 Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD understand all things.
Proverbs, that hard book, all submission and sin and trust in God.
The hills of Tennessee were a bus ride away.
The old folks in Florida would listen to a preacher, would understand his tortured drive, a man full of God and unable to hold it.
Alabama, Mississippi.
Escape.
The wicked flee...
“Oh, Lord,” Tate said, despair spilling from his eyes, “I have tried to be worthy of Thee.”
Without hope, he let the Bible fall open again. This time he read Peter’s terrible words:
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up.
“I’m afraid,” Tate whispered.
He closed the Bible, stood over the bed, looked down at the promise of his savings: North Carolina. South Carolina. Kentucky. Farther away, if he wanted.
The works of the earth.
Fervent heat.
A thief in the night.
Night had come outside now, dark and almost complete. Did the Lord lurk therein, ready to open the pit, to release a raging devil? Ready to give the final command to an angel standing with one foot on the land, the other on the sea? Ready to come as a thief in the night?
Tate sank to his knees. “Oh, God, I’m afraid,” he said, his voice shaking. “Don’t forsake me, God. Oh, please don’t forsake Thy servant.”
But all the time he tried to pray, the thought of the money, of the distance it could buy, returned again and again to his mind. His prayer, he realized bitterly, rose no higher tonight than the ceiling over his head.
A hundred fifteen dollars and thirty-three cents.
Wearily, Tate rose. He frowned down at the bills, the coins. He picked up the sock that was his bank and began to stuff the money back into it. All the while, his raspy voice shed malediction.
“Goddamn you,” he grunted, stuffing his hand deep in the sock. “Goddamn you to an ever-burning hell. Oh, Goddamn you, Goddamn you!”
Tate seemed to be addressing the money. Whether it was so, or whether he cursed himself — or perhaps even God — even he could not have said.
6
Night.
Deputy Presley climbs in his patrol car and sets off. He will patrol the northern and eastern parts of the town first tonight. He has not directed traffic at the mill since Tuesday night, but no one has complained. He does not plan to get out of the car tonight, either. Maybe he will never get out of it again, he thinks. Not after the way Eula had treated him, not after the way she had laughed... .
Night. The Advocate building is closed, locked up tight. No one there until Monday morning now; the scramble to get out two pages of Monday news is always the hardest of the week, for those two pages have to be tacked onto the fourteen pages of features (engagements and marriages, comics and entertainment, editorials and legal notices, fishing reports and ads, already laid out on this Saturday) so that a reader will feel he has his nickel’s worth Monday afternoon. But tonight the building sleeps.
Night. The marquee of the ShadowShow is dark, its new name sign backlit by incandescent lights, showing up in silhouette against the white-painted brick façade. Inside, all is quiet; not dead; not alive.
No one moves in the theater.
But there is a sense that someone is there.
Or perhaps the building itself is there.
It waits.
Night.
Private Parks, the Confederate statue, stands wrapped in patience, as if ready to repel an invasion.
Night. Windows wink into relief against the dark. Lights come on in bedrooms, bathrooms up the hill, up the ridge. Cars prowl the streets, cut-down cars and jacked-up cars filled with teenagers and music. Pat Boone writing love letters in the sand; syrupy strings taking you around the world in eighty days; the Everly Brothers saying bye-bye to love.
Night, and the bats appear, to dive into the whirling clouds of moths and beetles beneath the streetlights and emerge with ball-round bellies full, sharp teeth bloody.
Another night in Gaither, but not like any other night in Gaither.
Tonight it comes for the first time.
Tonight.
Like a thief.
7
There is no night in a big city. Night has retreated there before the brimstone glare of thickly clustered streetlights, the neon effulgence on every storefront. Where in daylight you would cast one shadow, at night you cast five. The only darkness visible there is directly overhead, unrelieved by stars, haunted by the palest ghost of a moon.
There is no night in a big city.
In a small town it is different. In Gaither, for instance, night sat heavy by nine-thirty on a late summer’s evening, dark and thick, even downtown. It was darker yet in the outlying streets of cheaply built and dearly rented white frame houses, streets where bright lights and neon were strangers, streets where fluted-saucer reflectors behind incandescent bulbs threw islands of light at sixty-foot intervals in the sea of night. Down one street Mr. Jefferson’s Lincoln cruised, and from inside it Mollie Avery looked out, brooding, into the night.
Mollie Avery knew the dark, and the archipelago of six lights strung from South Oglethorpe Street to her house, and she dreaded it. Never used to bother me, she thought. It never used to be no distance when I worked days in the mill. I walked it in a minute and a half. But now —
Now she looked into the car window and saw her own face, a young face turning old, too thin, eyes hollowing above gaunt cheekbones, dark hair concealed under a dark scarf. Through the face she saw the lights of cars at cross streets, the windows of houses, blue-lit by television sets tuned to “Adventure Theatre” or “Mystery Is My Business” or “Bold Journey.” Up front, behind the wheel of the Lincoln, Mr. Jefferson drove imperturbably, smoked his cigarette.
Mollie Avery thought he looked satisfied. Well, he should have, the white old pig. Wasn’t for Billy I’d quit this job, Mollie thought. Hell with cookin’ for a mean ol white man who wants me to sleep with him twice a week on top of that. And he won’t even take me to my door, just lets me out on the curb. Hell with that. When Billy gets work, I’ll quit, like that. Wouldn’t make any difference if Mr. Jefferson offered me another thirty dollars a week to do for him. No difference if he sweet-talked me about how nobody else cooks the way I do, or how I’m almost white, how I’m so pretty. I’ll quit, just like that, and never have to make that lonesome walk in the dark anymore.
The car stopped, pitching her forward a little. “Pick you up Monday morning,” Mr. Jefferson said. He flipped his cigarette butt out the open window.
“Thank you, sir,” Mollie whispered as she got out, clutching her purse. There was some small comfort in the purse: instead of washing the paring knife, she had stolen it. It nestled down there now with her billfold.
The Lincoln rumbled away. Mollie stood in the first circle of light, looking dully down at the red ash of the cigarette, still burning on the concrete. Then she lifted her eyes and looked up Slattery Row. Five pools of light lay ahead of her. It’s no real distance, she told herself. Think about it like it is in the daytime. White houses and the pecan trees and it’s no distance at all from the curb to the front door. Bet before he got killed, my brother Donald used to run that far playin’ football in no time at all. Come on, come on, I got to go. This is plain crazy, this standing here.
Her flat shoes slapped on the pavement. She paused to crush out the cigarette butt that Mr. Jefferson had discarded, then crossed the street, coming down a little harder than necessary with each step to make big sounds, loud sounds, firm slaps of leather against pavement, dying with no echo. Somebody had told her that
snakes were scared of what they feel through their bellies.
She was in the dark between the islands, and the night clogged her throat, stopped the breath before it reached her lungs, squeezed the plum of her heart until it felt bruised. Oh, Lord, let me get to the light. Just be with me till I get to the light.
Mollie stepped across a boundary as sharp as a line drawn on a globe, stepped from night into light, and the air rushed into her chest and her heart pounded against her ribs. Four more, she thought. Four more lights and then turn right and that’s my home.
No sidewalk here, but earth hard-packed from many feet, worn clean of grass. Mollie didn’t break stride. She spoke her thought aloud, in a quavering voice, no louder than a puppy’s whimper, and she walked to the rhythm of her words: “Four more lights and then turn right, four more lights and then turn right, three more lights — ”
Beneath the third light she halted. “Who’s there?” she asked, but her voice was so hushed that anyone outside the circle could not have heard. “Who that laughin’?”
No sound answered her: no leaf rustled, no breeze stirred, even the night insects seemed to have fallen silent. Mollie fixed her eyes on the next island of light. “That one and two more,” she told herself. “Just that one and then two more.”
The darkness seemed to weigh in on her with soft, lead-heavy pressure. She could not hear her own quick steps, could hear only the pound and rush of blood in her ears. She kept her eyes on a scrap of paper under the next streetlight, and then she was there, standing over the paper, looking down at it, a flattened white paper bag, torn and trodden, a hamburger bag from the place the white folks called the colored drive-in. A dark splotch of ketchup showed at one corner, like a blood blister inside the bag. Look down, make it easier, don’t look up at all, step over the bag and into the dark —
Mollie ran, reached the fifth street light, pulled up short —
Did the sound of running footsteps persist too long, did they stop only after she stopped? Her throat clenched tight on a rising scream, shut it off. I can’t even make a sound, not a sound, she thought in despair. I couldn’t make a sound to save my life.
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