“Oh, Mama.”
“Well, I have, and I don’t want you havin’ to quit school and get married before you’re sixteen. There’s lots of girls has done it, and they wind up like me.”
“Mama, you didn’t have to marry Daddy.” Diane’s face changed from indulgence to sudden doubt. “Did you?”
Mrs. England smiled at her daughter and touched her cheek. “No, hon. Your daddy’s a good man, and I was a good girl. But you were our first, and I think you would of made it worth it even if I had had to get married. But I seen too many good girls get in trouble when they didn’t know enough.”
Diane hugged her mother suddenly and hard. Then she pushed away. “Alan never has done more than hold my hand,” she said. “We never even kissed.”
“That will come.”
“Oh, Mama. I feel so funny about Alan. I mean, we played baseball together and all.”
“I know, hon. You’re gettin’ to be a big girl. But you remember what I told you.”
“I will.”
They heard a car outside. Mrs. England picked up the baby, smoothed her dress again, and went to the door. Alan stood there, his fist raised to knock. “Come on in,” Mrs. England said. She looked him over closely without really seeming to do so: a boy just getting into that tall stage where ankles and wrists are forever outrunning their cuffs, where the chin begins to show signs of whiskers. He was neatly dressed in a white nylon shirt and black pants, and he wore his Sunday shoes, black Oxfords, not tennis shoes. “You look nice,” Mrs. England said.
“Thank you,” Alan said, blushing. “Diane looks nice.”
“Is your daddy comin’ in?”
“Well, he could.”
Mrs. England opened the door. “Come in, Mr. Kirby.”
The car engine died, the car door slammed, and a moment later John Kirby came into the living room. “Hello, Helen May,” he said. “That couldn’t be your Duane, now.”
“Lord, no.” She laughed. “This here’s the youngest. Davey.”
John Kirby reached out his finger and the baby took it, shook it, and tried to turn it this way and that to examine it. “Hard to think that you have three now.”
“Time goes on by. Are you doin’ all right?”
“Pretty well, thank you. How’s Big Duane these days?”
“Doin’ pretty fair,” she said. “He was talkin’ just the other day about when you and him was on the baseball team.”
“Well, Duane England had an arm on him in those days,” Mr. Kirby acknowledged. “With him pitching and me catching, we had a couple of good seasons back before the war.”
“I remember seein’ you play against the Pacolet team from Hall County one time,” Mrs. England said. “Duane, he struck them all out but one, and you run and caught a pop fly right in front of home plate to put that one out. I didn’t know which one of you I liked better. Playin’ ball, I mean.”
The baby tried to suck John’s finger, and he laughed. “From the looks of these children, Helen, I’d say you picked the right one of us to marry.”
Alan had joined Diane on the sofa. Both of them were trying very hard indeed not to notice each other or their parents. As that left very little else in the room to look at, Alan was staring at the toes of his shoes and Diane was looking at her hands, folded together in her lap.
Mrs. England said, “Well, here I stand not offerin’ you anything. Will you have some coffee or ice tea? And set down, please.”
“No, thank you, Helen. We have to get going. It’s gettin’ on toward four o’clock, and these younguns want to see their picture show.”
“That’s right. Well, I hope they have a good time.”
“I’m sure they will. Now, I’ll pick them up at Ledford’s at seven o’clock and have Diane back home before seven-thirty. If it’s all right, Alan will buy her a hamburger for supper.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Mrs. England said. “Well, I guess y’all better be on your way if the picture show starts at five.”
Alan and Diane, still not having spoken to each other, got up together. “’Bye, Mama,” Diane said, giving her a peck on the cheek.
At that moment the baby farted. Diane looked as if she were about to die.
Ten
1
After his stint at the lumberyard, Brother Odum Tate returned to Mrs. Hudson’s boardinghouse. He bathed and dressed himself, then sat on the edge of his bed and turned on the radio, although for a long while he didn’t pay any attention to it.
Finally he came out of his reverie just as an announcer was moving into sports: “A crowd of thirty thousand watched the Texas Longhorns whip the Bulldogs twenty-six to seven today in a game marked by many penalties against Georgia. Quarterback Charlie Britt completed a third-quarter pass to Jimmy Orr for Georgia’s only touchdown. The high point of the game for the spectators was the introduction of Arkansas governor Orville Faubus. The governor stood and waved as an estimated thirty-three thousand football fans rose to their feet and cheered wildly.”
Tate snapped off the radio, stood, and picked up his Bible. He had not been preaching at all for a month now, but every afternoon when the weather permitted he went down to the Square and sat on one of the benches, reading scripture and waiting for guidance. Sometimes one of the Square regulars would sit down next to him and talk to him a bit; more often he would have the whole Square to himself as evening shadows lengthened and, one by one, the stores closed.
It was warm today as he walked toward the Square. The twenty-first of September, the first day of fall, felt more like early summer. The temperature was an even eighty, and the air, still soaked with the rainfall of the past week, held heat and humidity. Tate noticed how subdued town was, even for a Saturday afternoon, how quiet the streets, how abstracted the people. Something, a dark cloud, the cloud breathed forth from the bottomless pit, hung heavy and oppressive over Gaither, he thought.
He walked past Detterley’s Funeral Home on his way to the Square. It was quiet this afternoon; earlier in the week, though, it had been the center of a whirl of activity, cars parked two deep at the curb in front of it, the parking lot behind it crammed with other parked cars as four or five funerals went on at overlapping times. There seemed to be only one body there now: no cars were out front, and only four men, looking uncomfortable in unaccustomed suits, stood smoking on the front porch. On impulse, Tate walked over to the building and climbed the steps.
One of the men on the porch nodded gravely to him, and Tate extended his hand. “My name’s Odum Tate, brother,” he said in the hushed voice people reserve for funerals. “I’m a preacher of the Word.”
“Preacher,” said the man, a tall, gangly fellow of perhaps fifty, with brushed-back wiry black hair. “Name’s Dewey Eddowes.” He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, and he took another drag on it.
“Who’s dead, Brother Eddowes?” Tate asked.
“Old Miz Flora Norton. Was Flora Tedders before she married Clay Norton. My wife’s great-aunt.”
“I’m sorry, Brother Eddowes. How did she pass on?”
Eddowes flipped his cigarette onto the lawn. “She had a stroke, somebody said. She was eighty-seven.”
“Well, that’s a good old age.”
“Yeah, she lived a right long time.”
They stood for a moment awkwardly. Tate said, “I’ll remember your family in prayer, Mr. Eddowes.”
“Thank you, Preacher.”
Then, because leaving the cluster of men seemed somehow awkward, Tate went into the funeral home. The floral smell was almost overpowering, cloying in the throat. Women and men stood in small, hushed clusters, and a few looked up at him as he came in. The body of Mrs. Norton lay in state in Parlor A, and Tate went to look at it: a sad-faced old lady, still and calm, in a lavender dress and a look of peace. That, he decided, was the true look of death, the way death should look: rest after long turmoil, relief from the worries of the world. Death should visit not as terror and anguish, but as release.
He left
the viewing room and found an employee, recognizable by his black suit and black-tipped white carnation. The man, a chubby and youngish forty, stood a little apart from the mourners, his hands behind his back. “I’m Odum Tate,” the preacher said, holding his hand out.
“Clyde Detterley.” The undertaker’s handshake was a little moist, a little limp. “Friend of the family?”
“Yes, sir, in a way. Is Mrs. Norton the only funeral today?”
“Yes, sir. It’s slacked off since early in the week.”
“Gaither had a bad week.”
“Yes, sir. We handled nine funerals in all, Tuesday through Thursday. We normally might have handled three or four.”
“Well, we can hope it’ll get better.”
“Yes, sir. May I give you one of my cards, Mr. Cape?”
“Tate.” He took the pasteboard, glanced at the name, and slipped it into his breast pocket.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’d better see if the chapel’s ready.”
Tate left unobtrusively through a side door and headed downtown. Despite his words to Detterley, the preacher had a nagging feeling that it was in no sense over, that in fact it might only have begun: and the nearly empty streets reinforced the feeling.
Tate sat on one of the benches facing Private Parks, the Confederate statue, and opened his Bible. But before he began to read, Tate meditated. He felt close to something, some idea, some notion, here at the center of town. He thought of his own life and the life of Gaither, and in sifting through it all he found much sin.
There was the sin of pride, of a self-righteous little town that thought itself far more important and far better than it actually was. This was the sin that led people to ignore crimes and cruelties in other places with a dismissive “Well, that’s Atlanta.” Or Gainesville. Or Little Rock. Behind it was the unspoken assumption that Gaither was somehow better than other places, above the human weaknesses that led to sorrow and suffering there; behind it was overweening pride.
There was the sin of anger. He saw it smoldering in the eyes of people as they passed by in the streets, saw it in the look a white man might dart at a black one, or that a black one might, more surreptitiously, shoot at a white. It was an unfocused sort of sin, really a dissatisfaction with the sinner’s own life, that could not rest until it moved outward, until it turned against someone else.
There were sins of greed, and of lust, and of profaning the Name of God. Oh, the people of Gaither considered themselves good people, and in truth they were probably as good as people anywhere else; but that meant they were born sinners, they were raised sinners, and they lived and died sinners, saved not by their own goodness if they were saved at all, but rather saved by the mysterious and undeserved grace of God.
Except that grace seemed far removed from Gaither these days.
Tate sighed. He looked into the Book, read scattered passages, not with any plan, but haphazardly, humbly, praying all the while in the back of his mind for guidance.
The demons speaking through the mouth of the possessed man told Jesus that their name was Legion, for they were many. If demons could inhabit a man, they could inhabit a town: a herd of swine, running for death, for the edge of a cliff in Gadara. Satan, the tester, in Job, serving God despite his enmity, making sure that Job was indeed a good and faithful servant after all, giving the lie to his own assertions of the unalterable wickedness of all men. Lucifer, the son of the morning, for whom hell moved, coming to accept him as he fell.
As the afternoon wore toward evening, Tate read and searched the scriptures, not finding what he wanted to find, and not aware that, not more than a hundred yards from the place he sat, his young friend Alan was watching a movie and feeling lost in his own private misery.
2
The show began promisingly enough, first with coming attractions: trailers for a western/adventure duo, The True Story of Jesse James and Nightmare Alley; then a Marilyn Monroe picture, Bus Stop; then a story about a woman who apparently had more than one person living inside her head, The Three Faces of Eve; and especially for Halloween, a shock double feature: Curse of Frankenstein and X — The Unknown.
A cartoon followed these up, a Woody Woodpecker. And after that, the movie itself, Man of a Thousand Faces, the story of Lon Chaney. At first Alan and Diane had shared a box of popcorn and some whispered talk, but as the movie went on, they became engrossed in Chaney’s biography, the story of a man who would suffer even physical pain to bring his screen portrayals to life. Well into the movie — just after the re-creation of the unmasking scene from Phantom of the Opera, done so well that it made both Diane and him jump — Alan began to lose track, for some reason.
He still saw the story unfolding on the screen; it wasn’t that he had lost consciousness. But gradually he began to feel uneasy, short of breath. He became aware of each movement of his chest, of the inrush of air through nostrils and down into his lungs, of the aching hold, then the collapse of muscles and the slow exhalation. He felt as if the theater were too hot, the air too close, or as if the air were bad, already breathed, breathed thousands of times by people long dead.
But still greedy for the air, he thought suddenly. They’re dead and they don’t want to be dead, they want what I have now, life, and they’d like to take it from me if they can’t have it themselves.
If he could have moved, Alan would have gotten up, mumbled an excuse, gone out to the lobby for a drink of water and a breath of air. But something seemed to hold him in his seat, to keep his attention on the flickering screen even as his discomfort grew. A tiny, distracting sound fluttered at the very edge of his awareness, like a moth not daring to come too close to a light. Part of his mind wondered what it was, worried the problem like a dog gnawing a bone, until it succeeded in identifying the sound.
Next to him, Diane was whimpering.
3
Ballew Jefferson no longer concerned himself about the dark.
Lamps, two dozen of them, brought some days ago by Miss Wayly, stood on every flat surface in the kitchen, plugged into six extension cords. A hundred-watt bulb burned in each lamp.
He had cleared away the broken glass and had finally managed to do something with the growing mound of garbage. He was now dumping everything, slop pail, chamber pot, garbage, out the back window. A sizable accumulation had already grown there, but inside, the kitchen was neater than it had been in many days.
His belt was pulled through two new notches now. His skin sagged under his growth of whiskers, and his ribs ridged out beneath the fleshless covering of his chest. The cuts on his hands and arm were healing slowly, though with no sign of infection. He had finally removed the stitches in his palm himself, with the tip of the very sharp knife he had fashioned, and with the tweezers of his teeth.
The ceiling of the kitchen had grown a layer of soot over the stove, which still hissed blue gas. The thermometer he had tacked to the wall above the counter registered one hundred and five, though even as he read it Jefferson felt cold. He was thirsty all the time, too, and drank what seemed to be gallons of water, which passed right through him, emerging as red-tinged urine.
But he didn’t have to worry about night anymore. The bulbs blazed with a noonday glare, spilled light plentifully into the room, drove all shadows far away. They shone unobstructed, for he had removed the shades and had crushed them before tossing them out the back window, as far as he could. Now Ballew Jefferson lived in heat and light. Not for many days had he heard her step close by. When the window grew dark, now, there was only the faintest muffled tread coming from up on the bedroom floor of the house. He thought he was winning.
The telephone was still a problem. He had offended his sister, he hoped for good, the last time she had called. People from the bank continued to phone, every other day or so, to ask for his decision on some loan or his advice on some transaction. He was curt, to the point, and evidently effective: the bank went on without him, to all intents and purposes quite as well as it had ever gone on with him ther
e.
In his light and heat, Ballew Jefferson considered that for hours on end. He had felt twinges of mortality before: holding his first child newborn in his arms, watching all the children graduate and marry, waiting by his wife’s bedside while she breathed out the last of her life. Signposts to the grave, all of them, and each one had reminded him of being just that much closer to the end of it all himself. Still, in his fantasies he supposed himself the captain of a ship, perhaps going down with the vessel but certainly never deserting it.
Yet the bank sailed serenely on without him. That last signpost, the one telling him he was no longer essential, or even particularly needed, was written in the darkest characters of all. Here, he thought, is what my life comes down to: abandoned by my children, consulted only out of courtesy, fear, or greed by my employees, terrified by what the town knows of Mollie Avery and me (where had that damnable motion picture come from?), I rest alone beneath the kitchen table, protected by light, afraid of the dead woman and her dead mate (in court he had seen Billy Resaca only fleetingly, but somehow he had decided that the half-glimpsed black specter with the ruined arms was indeed the man whom Mollie called her “common-law”), starved for warmth and starved of body.
He knew, quite lucidly, that he was undoubtedly crazy.
He knew that he needed help.
And when he thought of calling for help — when he imagined the looks on the faces of the men or women who would come gasping into his private hell, whose hair would dance in the heat he required even to feel alive, whose eyes would see and evaluate and accuse — at those times his resolve would harden again.
He would wait her out.
He would wait them all out.
He gorged himself on canned foods. He punched holes in the tops of Carnation condensed milk and drank the liquid straight from the cans, for the sake of the calories. He once ate most of a stick of creamery butter, holding it like a candy bar and munching on it, before his stomach revolted and he vomited the grease up again.
ShadowShow Page 24