Jefferson knew he had to feed the animal. What was that line from the Irish poet? A spirit fastened to a dying animal? He couldn’t remember. No matter. The body had to live, the spirit had to be housed. If in this kitchen he died of malnutrition or starvation, he would win no victory.
And so he forced himself to eat, straight out of cans, beans, soups, meats. He thought it was catching hold now: not for days had he had to contemplate making another hole in his belt, the miserable diarrhea that had wrenched him on and off during the previous days had abated, and his weight seemed to stay constant. That Saturday, for the first time in a long time, he dared to hope that he might somehow win after all, that he might actually succeed in waiting out Mollie Avery.
In the late afternoon, he did something he had not done in weeks. He found a polished cookie sheet (Mollie had kept all her pots and pans shiny, seeming almost brand-new) and used it as a mirror to study his face.
It was an unfamiliar one: hair, what was left, whiter than he recalled, matted to the scalp with sweat and heat. Chin whiskered, bristled with a respectable beard, but somehow receded for all of that: and above the beard, two cheekbones that cast triangular shadows over fallen chaps. Lips blistered, cracked, and blackened, and eyes staring out from deep sockets. He looked, he thought, like his own grandfather.
There had never before been a resemblance between Jefferson and his grandfather Arthur, the hardscrabble farmer who had been forced into the Confederate Army against his will — he kept no slaves and saw no reason to defend the self-proclaimed right of his more affluent neighbors to the south to do so — and who lived to be ninety-two, dying suddenly one summer’s day back in ‘36. The old man’s face had showed the courses of his life, mapped on forehead and cheek and throat in lines of hard work, disappointment, and stubbornness.
Ballew Jefferson, as a boy, had always been a little afraid of his grandfather, the profane, tobacco-chewing old man who had put his son through college just, as he said, “So’s you can steal back from the rich sonsabitches some of what they took from me.” And Sherry Jefferson, Ballew’s father (he preferred the humiliation of his feminine-sounding nickname to the awful truth: his grandfather had named him Sherman in 1869, in memory of the blue-uniformed devil who had burned Atlanta), had done that, pretty much. As a lawyer he had prospered in the county, laying up the modest wealth that would allow his son, along in the next century, to invest in the Trust Bank of Gaither.
His father, a round, soft man (though he could grow sharp and hard in court) had died only a year after his grandfather, as if the old man’s iron will had kept him going, too. And people who remembered both of his forebears had told each other than Ballew resembled his father, not his grandfather. Ballew’s brother Matthew was supposed to be the one who “took after” old Arthur Jefferson. But Matthew was long gone, too, dead in the trenches of France in October of 1918, only a few weeks before the Armistice.
So the bearer of Arthur Jefferson’s standard turned out to be soft Ballew after all. It came to him, in his nest of light, that he was the one who had finally owned the slave. Arthur had not been able to, nor would he ever have desired to, purchase human beings or even their labor. Sherry had always had a finicky aversion to colored help, preferring to hire only white cooks, maids, gardeners, and drivers. Ballew was the one who had employed the blacks: Ludie, Tom-Bob (he had done the yard every year up until ‘54, when he had an inconvenient stroke), and — of course — Mollie.
Mollie, the real slave.
Mollie, whom he had taken into his bed.
Mollie, who had been on the screen with him.
And with a clarity as piercing as the glare from his dozens of light bulbs, there in his kitchen, hiding like a cornered animal beneath his table, Ballew Jefferson at last glimpsed the truth: between the master and the slave, there is no one free. Both wear chains of servitude.
Mollie had owned him, or had thought she owned him.
And one day, someday, she would come to claim her property.
With a look on his face that made him resemble even more strongly old Arthur Jefferson, Ballew Jefferson settled in to wait. To hone his blade and wait.
But always in the light.
4
Andy McCory had bought himself a used car, a ‘46 Ford, and still had enough left over to buy the family a secondhand television set as well. True, its picture was more round than square, and for the size of the cabinet that housed it, the picture tube was minute, only twelve inches on the diagonal; but it worked. It pulled pictures and music into the McCory home, and it entranced the children. Now, late on a Saturday afternoon, they lay on their stomachs and watched Joe Palooka fighting it out in snowy black and white, as Lee McCory watched them, not the set, and wondered what was wrong with her husband.
For Andy was different, there was no denying that. He moved differently, talked differently, seemed even to think differently. He certainly made love differently.
That was the most difficult of all for her: having a stranger in her bed, in her arms. And yet —
And yet, if she were asked what about the change disturbed her, she would be hard put to it to give any rational answer. Andy had not taken a drink, not so much as one beer, in all the time he had been working at his new job. Except for one or two occasions, he was home at predictable times. He had more money than he had ever had, and seemed to have more self-respect. He gave her money to buy things, clothes for the children, food for the table. He paid attention to his appearance, shaving daily, wearing a clean shirt every day, changing his trousers every other day. He even had gone to the dentist to have something done about the ugly spreading cavity in his front teeth and had had that repaired so that you could hardly even see the filling; more, the kids were to see the dentist next month, just to make sure their baby teeth were healthy. Lee had never dreamed of such extravagance.
Yes, Andy had changed, but anyone looking at him would swear he had changed for the better.
Why, then, did she draw back, as if by instinct, from his touch?
She decided it was his way of talking, for one thing. He was forgetful and fretful, screaming at her one moment for not doing things to his liking, all apology and teasing the next moment. True, he had almost stopped hitting her — had stopped, really, except for some stinging slaps across the thigh or rump, more lascivious than angry — but his moods swung wildly and without warning from affection to fury. The tension of living with him, of trying to anticipate the unpredictable weathers of his heart, was worse in a way than the beatings had been, and more painful.
And it hurt to see the children’s reaction to their father. Danny and Little Lee were quiet in his presence, the silence of fear, not of respect. His touch on their heads was indifferent, dead almost, his notice of them as uncaring as it would have been of a tree or a rock. The children had stopped protesting that he was not their real father, but she read the thought in their eyes and — God help her — she had begun to have the same fantasy herself. This provider, this man with whom she slept, was somehow not her husband, not the father of Danny and Little Lee at all, but an impostor.
One event, more than all the others, had stabbed her heart like a dagger of ice. Lee’s mother lived out in New Haven, in the mill house she shared with Lee’s father, two brothers, and sister. When she had married Andy, her mother had seemed to write her off as dead. Lee had always been her daddy’s favorite, and it wasn’t hard to see him; but not until the children were born, not until Lee had made her for the first time a grandmother, had Mrs. Summerour relented enough to allow Lee back into her house.
Now she was a doting granny, better to Little Lee and Danny — Lee thought enviously — than she had ever been to her own children. And the grandchildren, knowing a good thing when they saw it, fawned on her. But until this week, they had never spent the night at Granny Summerour’s house. On Wednesday, Lee had let them sleep over, while she and Andy made love in the creaking old bed. They had made love several times, in fact, for lately An
dy seemed unusually lusty.
But Thursday, when she had gone to pick them up, driving in their newly purchased car, both children had begged to stay. Annoyed, Lee had snapped, “Your granny gives you too much candy, that’s what it is. That’s why you love her and you don’t love me.”
And Danny, lip trembling, had said, “No, Mama. It’s him.”
She knew. Oh, she knew.
Now, as the kids watched the adventures of the blond boxer, she turned over alternatives in her mind. She could get a job in the cotton mill, in the roving department maybe or the spinning room. There was a hosiery mill in town; she could make stockings. She could work at the hatcheries, grading chicks. She could work at the poultry plant, butchering and packaging chicken. Hard work, all of it, backbreaking labor for low pay: but what else was she fit for? She had quit school to marry Andy. Who would hire someone who had never finished the tenth grade? Who would give her a decent job?
But people somehow managed on the salaries they drew from the chicken plants or from the mills. That could be done. Only who would be left to care for the children? Even if she took the third shift, the graveyard shift, she couldn’t leave Danny and Little Lee alone in the house at night, not after the awful things that had happened in town this last month, not with Andy still in town.
And she knew that her mother was no answer. The children were already a wedge between them, lodged firmly in the ill-mended crack that had broken open once before. Sooner or later there would come a time when her mother would want the children but wouldn’t want Lee.
But there had to be a way.
Lee knew what the decision would have to be, knew that it would be sudden and final. “Kids,” she would say, standing up, “we’re moving.”
The children would then go and pack all their clothes and some of their toys (almost all of their toys, really; they had so few) in a big, broken-cornered suitcase of heavy cardboard. In a smaller suitcase Lee would put her own possessions before going next door, borrowing the phone, and calling a taxi. It would take them to her mother’s house, where they would spend the night.
The next day she would have to go looking for a job, perhaps managing to find a good one, a better one than she had hoped for, maybe working as a clerk in the five-and-dime. Lee imagined herself explaining to Andy about herself and the children, imagined finding him indifferent. It was even possible Andy would agree not to contest the divorce.
Sure enough, even in her fantasy, she had trouble with her mother before the year was out. But by then Lee had done so well that she was made supervisor of her shift, and she was able to hire someone to watch the kids during the day in the mill house they were renting. The divorce was final before the end of that year. Before the end of the next, Lee was dating a man she had met on the job, a kind and gentle man who worked hard as a mechanic for the Southern Railroad. They were married the next year.
The children began school, and when Little Lee was in second grade her half-sister Rose was born. Lee’s new husband was able to move into a better-paying job with the Seaboard, and Lee in turn was free to quit her own job. They lived together happily as a family, and they never mentioned Andy.
All this never happened, except in Lee’s idle daydream. It all flashed through her mind that Saturday afternoon as Little Lee and Danny watched their twelve-inch TV. She thought of getting out of her chair, of saying in a brisk voice, “Kids, we’re moving.”
But the unknown reaches of her life seemed very broad and dark, very perilous.
In the end, she bit her lip and said nothing.
In the end, she decided to give Andy one more chance.
Maybe, she thought, it isn’t really as bad as it seems.
After all, she told herself, he hasn’t really changed. He’s still the same Andy, really.
Isn’t he? Isn’t he?
Isn’t he?
5
Alan watched his mother die.
He didn’t know when the shadows on the screen stopped being the story of Lon Chaney and started being scenes from his own life, from his own family, but they had, running like a dream in a fever, an impossibly rapid succession of images. At times he felt that he was no longer in the audience, no longer safe in his seat, but was one with those shadows, shared in their misery and ugliness.
He had already seen his father at Dachau, or someplace close to it. His father had been shockingly young, seeming hardly older than Alan himself, swollen by his baggy GI trousers and his pack, but his face, under the helmet and liner that seemed absurdly large, was the pinched, thin face of a boy. Alan stood with him as men on tractors uncovered a pit, and with him Alan stared into the pit, a jumble of human bodies, corpses obscenely, promiscuously entangled in the long sleep of death and rot. It was impossible to look, impossible to look away.
Near the trench, but just dropped in a pile on the ground, was a pile of dentures, partials, uppers, lowers, full sets, the ones on the top pink and white, the ones on the bottom faded, the gums the color of dirty old ivory piano keys, speckled green algae growing on the teeth. It was a grotesquely large pile, certainly taller than Alan.
Then it was gone, and he saw his mother groaning in labor, gasping for breath, and watched as she died. He could not move, could not stir a finger: his face was numb, his lips dead. He could not even feel the tears spilling over his cheeks, dripping from his chin. He could no more cry out than avert his eyes. The doctor, smeared, splashed with blood, shaking his head: the baby dead, too (his sister, never truly born, dead before the world knew her). And a sheet swept over the large still form and a sheet swept over the small still one, and they were now citizens of that underground city of the dead. They had joined the patient corpses of Dachau.
Images continued, pulling Alan in. He saw his father’s face again, the helmet shadowing his eyes, and he watched his father take photograph, photograph, photograph, of the horrors of war. Did he read something wild in those eyes, so much like his? Some fascination with the things he saw and recorded, some dark urge, some wish that the finger were depressing not a shutter release but a trigger, that he, too, were dealing some small share of the great death? A madness lurked there, surely.
His mother, alive again, and younger than he could ever remember her being, dressed in strange old-fashioned clothing, joked with a man at a service station, laughed at his insinuating remarks. Where was John Kirby? In the army? And what was his mother doing? Flirting with the man who changed her tire, trading innuendoes with him? What did she want?
Alan saw a crazy series of flashes: Miss Lewis standing naked (naked!) at a window, head thrown back, and a shadowy man (John Kirby, his father) coming from behind to stroke her torso, to cup her breasts in his hands, she arching her back, nuzzling her face against his cheek —
Preacher Odum Tate drinking whiskey straight from a bottle, cursing a woman, while a sick child wailed piteously in another room —
A woman, thin and young, sprawled on the grass, her body an unspeakable ruin —
A man in police uniform firing a gun not two feet away from a woman’s face —
A black man with bleeding tatters of flesh in his teeth —
All was dark.
I’m dead, Alan thought very clearly.
A voice, a thought, answered him: Clever boy. Yes, you are.
No. I don’t want to be dead.
Nor does any of your breed. Yet they all come to it, in the end.
Help me.
Child. You imagined there was good on earth, that it came from within people like you. That is a lie. There is no good in man or woman. I live, and I cannot live without their evil. See them with my eyes, and you see only foulness and corruption. Look at this.
The screen was alight again. It was a scene of Gaither, but a Gaither of many years gone by: the Square looked much the same, though Private Parks had a bronze luster instead of the layers of verdigris that he now wore. But the theater, the State, the ShadowShow, was not there: instead Alan saw a ramshackle, tin-roofed barn
of a building, painted white and faded dingy gray. Ornate but weather-beaten blue letters painted across the tall front of the building proclaimed it the Simmons Livery Stable.
The scene changed, as a scene in a movie does, and Alan knew he was now inside the building. Two men, one white, one black, quarreled in front of a horse in a stall. “You ain’t gettin’ no five dollars from me, Jim Bascom!” the white man, stocky in boots, tan trousers, and tan shirt, bellowed.
The black man, as tall as the white one but thinner by forty pounds and younger by twenty years, grinned and almost danced in his anxiety. “Please, sir,” he begged, his voice high-pitched with fear, “please, Mr. Simmons. You done promise me that five dollars. I done everything you ast me to.”
“I just bet you did,” Mr. Simmons growled. “I just bet everything’s all fixed and done and I won’t have to spend all day tomorrow doin’ it again.”
“Aw, Mr. Simmons. You knows I work hard.”
“Get on out of here, boy. You come back tomorrow, I might just have some work for you.”
“Mr. Simmons, it done been a week that I work for you. Please, sir, I needs the five dollars.”
Simmons walked over to the wall, where a coil of rope hung from a nail. He took the rope down, unwound three feet of it, and came back toward the black man. The end of the rope swished viciously in the air as he twitched it like a whip. “You get on out of here, boy. You forget about comin’ in tomorrow. I don’t take back talk from your kind.”
“Aw, now, Mr. Simmons — ”
The rope hit the black cheek and drew blood. It spilled through black fingers as Bascom tried to hold it in. The eyes of Jim Bascom were small round mirrors of hatred.
Abruptly the scene changed. It was night, now, and Alan saw the stable as if from the outside, from the base of the statue in the Square. Orange light shone from within. A lick of flame tasted the frame of the loft door.
Then the world was dissolving in fire and smoke and the shrill screams of dying mules and horses. It was more than a movie: Alan felt the heat on his face, smelled the sickening stench of burning hair and flesh, watched as black silhouetted scurrying figures threw ineffective streams of water.
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