In this church of spells and curses (to which all his Hayes relatives belonged—seeing no conflict between their chucking salt over their left shoulders, snapping wishbones, or rubbing rusty horseshoes, on the one hand, and their Christianity on the other), Flonnie Rogers was high priestess. Under her, his grandmother’s ancient black maid, Raleigh served his novitiate, for Flonnie’s boasted victories over Satan, and her own scathing disposition convinced the boy that, of all his acquaintance, her conjurations were likely to have the most impact on the Powers. Personal witness soon confirmed this opinion.
In the old Hayes house, at the end of the upstairs hall, Flonnie slept in a cubicle curtained off by two blue quilts hung on a rod. Blue kept witches away. Beneath her loose-springed bed with its swallowing mattress (goose feathers sucked away lightning), she kept a tin trunk, whose secrets she would never reveal to him, except to say they might be rattlesnakes and they might be ghosts. From her trunk came a potion which she said would remove the warts that had grown on Raleigh’s hands when he was six. (It was at this time that he had first heard adults whispering that his father was “seeing” Roxanne Digges.) Even had Flonnie known about his family troubles—and she probably did—her diagnosis would have been the same. She did not believe in psychosomatic responses: action caused reaction. Personal offense alone brought down punishments like warts. Raleigh had warts either because he had killed a toad-frog, had sat in a chair backward on the Sabbath, had failed to reverse nine steps after being crossed by a black cat, or, and most likely, he had warts because he had aggravated the peace of mind of someone cherished by the Powers, namely herself.
These dreadful possibilities she listed on the cold, black, lonesome night when a bad dream chased Raleigh down the hall of empty bedrooms to her cubicle. It was one of the rare times when his grandparents’ house was not crowded with some assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins, for (according to Victoria Anna) no Hayes could ever face the notion of growing up and leaving home for good; on this occasion (in February!) most of them were at the beach for George Washington’s Birthday. “Pack of fools,” said Flonnie Rogers. This cold, scary night, Flonnie had begrudgingly allowed Raleigh the safety of her company, if he allowed her to take care of his warts first. From her trunk she took a jar of paste, spat into it, stirred it with her finger, and smeared it roughly on his knuckles where the warts grew. The paste smelled like lard, rotten eggs, and tobacco, and stung like hot peppers.
“I bet a million dollars it won’t work,” sniffled the six-year-old Raleigh.
“The Lord hates a betting boy, much as a boy who wiggles and
whines. I won’t truck with the fidgets.” Flonnie Rogers was old, but
not much taller or larger than Raleigh. Her long nightgown, like her
sheets, was starched cotton, sharply creased, and cold and white as
ice. Her hair was white too; it always astonished the boy when she
took off the knotted handkerchief with his grandfather’s initials sewn
into it that she wore under a baseball cap, and unwove dozens of
braids, until the hair stood stiffly out around her dark face like a halo
of icicles. Astonishing too the way she reached inside her mouth
with a funny grin, pulled out her teeth, then dropped them in a glass
of water on the table beside her kerosene lamp. Raleigh stared at
those teeth while, on his knees, her thin hand clinched round the
back of his neck, he waited shivering as she prayed with intrepid
bossiness to the Lord. Afterward, she sang Raleigh a lullaby that
scared him to death.
Way down yonder, in the meadow, Lies a poor little baby.
Gnats and flies, picking out his eyes. Poor little thing is crying, “Mammy!”
Teeth chattering as he lay in the cold cotton, Raleigh whispered, “Did his mama save him?”
“No, she never did. You want to know why she left her own little baby boy out there with his eyes all eaten up and bobcats gnawing off his toes?”
Raleigh both did and did not want to know.
“Because that self-same day that boy had tromped all over her fresh-mopped floor. Now you hush and stop that wiggling.”
Raleigh tried desperately to keep still, holding his penis to pacify himself.
“You got to pee?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You get out of this bed and get downstairs and go to the bathroom. I’m not fixing to have you mess up my sheets in the middle of the night. And don’t you go in there and wake up your grandma either.”
Her accusation of incontinence mortified Raleigh. As he crept through the downstairs rooms, he cried. The bathroom was dark miles and miles away, along a black corridor past the kitchen. The cracking linoleum on that corridor was like frozen snow under his bare feet. Feet that bobcats crouched in wait for.
The next evening, Raleigh’s warts had begun to dry up; a week later they were gone.
And so Flonnie Rogers held a compelling fascination for the young boy. Whereas all his cousins kept carefully away from the sharp-tempered old woman, he followed her secretly about the house to study her magic. Indeed, it could be said that she, along with his aunt Victoria Anna, formed his wary view of the world. Under their uncooperative tutelage (for the two women couldn’t abide each other), Raleigh was confirmed in his opinion that you had to grasp life sternly in order to shake any sense out of it, and that most people had so little power and get up and go that they let life flop and flail them about like sheets in the wind.
During the first months that Raleigh hovered in the shadow of Flonnie’s potent protection, she shooed him away with that indiscriminate wrath she appeared to feel toward all children. “None of your nevermind how old I am. You, Bassie, get out from under my feet ’fore I toss you in the fire and fry you quicker’n you can say ‘Jack Robinson.’ ”
“I’m not Bassie. He’s my uncle. I’m Raleigh Whittier Hayes.”
“You think I’m studying what you calling yourself? I never come across any boy wasn’t a fool and aggravation to start with, and growed into worst, if the law didn’t catch him and throw a rope around his neck first.”
“Why would they throw a rope around his neck?”
“To choke him till his tongue stuck out all swollen and his eyes bulged loose from his head.”
“Why?”
“For pestering folks.”
But one day, after twisting a knuckle into his scalp for messing with her flour sifter, Flonnie suddenly thrust into Raleigh’s hand the lace pattern of dough left over from the pan of biscuits she made daily, whether there were two or twenty to eat them. He wadded it into a tight ball and kept it in his pocket until it was so dirty only Mingo Sheffield would have eaten it. Another day, as he hid among the green cornstalks, spying on her from the garden that stretched for half a block behind the house, she called him over to the wood stump to hold her axe while she caught a chicken. In a sweat of horrible excitement, he watched her twist the poor hen’s neck, whip it in a feather-flying arc over her head, and, grabbing the axe, slap it shrieking on the stump, and whack its head off. With grim satisfaction she watched the short mad scramble of the headless body to flee what had already happened. She turned to Raleigh and said, “You see this axe? When I was a little slave girl, I took it and stove in my master’s head. I couldn’t abide his hatefulness one more minute. He was a mean man, had a big old sugar plantation right down the road from here and he starved everybody to death and beat us to death and sold us to anybody had a dollar in his pocket. One day I took and sharpened this axe and sliced him in two different pieces. They jumped up and tried to walk off in two different places, then they both dropped down dead as doornails at my feet.”
Heart pounding, Raleigh watched her as she cupped her apron to wipe onto it the blood from the blade. He stood speechless as she grabbed up the dead chicken by its feet and started toward the back steps. “Now, go scuffle and pick me some col
lards ’fore I pack you in a crate, put you on the train with a note says deliver you to that old master, and he’ll have you cutting cane sunup to sundown till your fingers bleeds and your bones crook. Till you’re knee-bent and bodybowed. Then he put you on the block and make you look spry, he lay it on and then rub pepper in your sores, and stick you in the calaboose where the sun burn you up alive.”
Raleigh faltered. “No, he won’t. I’m just a child.”
“He’s worse on a child. Tie you to a tree all day in the fields so the plow won’t cut off your toes. Make you hoe; make you eat slops from a hog trough, and you try to get a little learning, he pokes out your eyes.”
These horrors defeated Raleigh. He squatted on the ground to think. Finally, he ran over to the steps. “How can he? You said you chopped him up!”
Brown feathers leaped from Flonnie’s fingers. “I did chop him. He grew back.”
Years later, after Raleigh knew that there had never been a sugar plantation in the red clay country around Thermopylae, and that, old as she was, Flonnie was not old enough to have wielded an axe in the 1860s, he nevertheless knew her story to be true. As true as the other unsensible stories he was starting to hear adults tell at that time. Stories about terrible Nazis and barbarous Japs and brand-new bombs that could erase whole cities in a wink of an eye. And stories that his aunt Victoria brought home about what had happened in China to some of her missionary customers in particular, and what had happened in general around the world since the world began. “Getting loved by Jesus will not buy you rice,” Aunt Victoria took him aside to say at a Hayes family reunion where his cousins were singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” atop a picnic table.
“No, Jesus never gave me much indication of loving everybody equal, and if you care to come back with me to Malaya, little boy, you’ll see what I mean.”
At seven, Raleigh was already concluding that Life was not the bowl of cherries his uncle Hackney kept strumming about on his ukulele. Life was a race, a test, a fight, and God didn’t care who won, or how. Hadn’t Ned Ware outraced Raleigh by jumping the teacher’s whistle? Hadn’t Judy McClung outspelled him because she’d gotten “house” and he’d gotten “ocean”? Hadn’t Jimmy Clay outfought him by sticking his fingers in his eye? Either God didn’t care, or God had His favorites. “You’re my favorite, Little Fellow! My favorite thing in the whole wide world,” Raleigh’s father would shout, tossing him in air as if he thought he could fly. But Raleigh had heard his father make the same profligate vow to a dozen other people and it only made him angry.
Raleigh was suspicious, too, of the way God chose His favorites, if Flonnie was right that Elwood Bragg was one of the Chosen.
The day Flonnie told him about the slave master, while she was on the back steps, plucking the still bleeding bird, she abruptly yelled at the boy, “Run quick cross the street, tell Miz Cawthorne to get out back, Elwood’s robbing her clothesline again.”
“No. I’m scared of him,” Raleigh told her.
For Elwood, flat-haired and gap-toothed with a wide, pasty imbecile face, and always wearing the same old Eisenhower jacket and bright red tennis shoes, did not make sense, and irrationality was as disturbing to the child Raleigh as it was to the adult. A man in his thirties, Elwood, for reasons Raleigh could not comprehend, coveted the voluminous undergarments that an elderly widow hung out on a line in her backyard. Whenever Mrs. Cawthorne saw him snatch one of her three-sectioned pink girdles off the line and hook it on over his baggy jeans, she’d tear out of her porch door and chase him down the sidewalk, waving at him the wire fly swatter the funeral home gave away as advertisements. Raleigh’s older cousin Paschal delighted in this scene and would hide behind the hedge to watch, but Raleigh was terrified of Elwood’s sudden dancing steps and loud inexplicable laughter.
“I won’t go!” he shouted, so Flonnie ran herself to the street curb, cupped her hands and yelled, “YOU, Elwood Bragg! You put Miz Cawthorne’s drawers back on the line like they belong! I’d be shamed to be a growed-up white man and act like a fool the way you do!”
Stunned, the large pudgy man burst into awful tears, dropped the underwear as if it were burning, and hopped clumsily backward around the side of the Cawthorne house.
“He’s crazy,” whispered Raleigh. “I wish they’d put him in jail for good!”
Instantly, he felt Flonnie’s hand, dry and thin as paper, slap his cheek. “Those touched in the head belongs to the Lord. They His special chosen. If I catch you and Paschal teasing him, I’m going to whale the stuffing out of you. That’s trash, acting that way. Like teasing your poor old grandpa, sneaking up and spinning his wheelchair every whichway.”
“I didn’t do that!”
“You watched. I don’t truck with trash.”
Raleigh, who’d heard Flonnie condemning things as “trash” since he’d met her, asked her now what trash was.
“It’s most white folks. And most black folks, too. And it’s anybody pops his gum out loud the way you do. Spit it out in the wrapper. I need you to go up to the corner and get me a can of Tuberose. Sciatica’s got my legs so bad I can’t walk it. And you can have a nickel.” From the pocket of her bloody apron she took a dollar bill folded to the size of a button. Carefully, she smoothed it out. “Don’t you dare to waste time looking in the Five and Dime. The police chief’s hiding in there just waiting to catch little white boys and throw them in the jailhouse where you so quick to lock poor old Elwood up for good.”
Raleigh took the dollar. “I don’t care, I heard they do have places they put crazy people.”
Flonnie was stuffing Raleigh’s striped T-shirt into his corduroys, turning him roughly in a circle. “That’s right. They put anybody in there they feel like. Chain them to walls and never turn them loose till they nothing but bones, and you can see the marks where they dug their fingernails in the stones trying so hard to get free.”
Raleigh’s teeth bit down on his tongue. “Did you see the marks?”
“Go get me a can of Tuberose snuff, and don’t walk under that ladder where they’re painting the bank. And don’t you dare to drop my change. I got to pay Mr. Overton on my burial insurance today.”
“What’s your burial insurance mean?”
“The way you always telling how you already know everything there is to know, how come you don’t know that?” She took a green broken-toothed comb from her pocket and yanked it through Raleigh’s hair. “I been taking care of myself my whole life long and I ’spect to go on doing it after I’m dead. I pay in to the insurance man, and when I’m gone, he pays all my bills so I get a decent burial beholden to nobody. I don’t count on nobody but me.”
“Ouch!”
“Hold still. I don’t count on the Lord and He knows He don’t have to take up His time worrying over me.”
“Does He only like crazy people?”
“Now go on. And keep that hair out of your eyes ’fore they cross theyselves and you can’t get them unstuck.”
And so, apprenticed to Flonnie Rogers, Raleigh was learning not only such tricks as how to keep ghosts out of the house with St. John’s wort, such facts as that if he saw an egg sweat blood by firelight, he’d meet his sweetheart in the morning, but, more usefully, the trick of insurance against the fact of a world of trash and folly.
In Flonnie’s superstitions, and his own, however, he eventually lost faith: a sidewalk crack had no effect on his mother’s back, peas didn’t care in what order they were eaten, it was as silly to carry around a rabbit’s foot as a crow’s claw or a goat’s hoof. Eventually he forgot about the miracle of his warts. He forgot, too, about Flonnie’s notion that God had “chosen” the moronic Elwood Bragg. He remembered only her warning not to rely on the Deity, but get insurance instead.
Nearly a year after the day of the chicken-slaying, Raleigh was again visiting his grandparents alone, for his mother had gone away by herself to “think” about her marriage, and his father had been called away by the archdiocese to answer cha
rges brought by his parishioners that he was morally unfit to be their pastor. The first night at supper, Raleigh sat by himself in the immense shadowy dining room at the end of a table meant for twenty. His feet rested on the rung of the dark, high-backed, cane-bottomed chair; from his neck billowed a huge cloth white napkin. Circled around him sat small plates of sausage patties, sliced cantaloupes, hard strips of country ham, butter beans, stewed corn, stringy okra (which he hated), snap beans with fatback, cold biscuits, and cold chicken—all leftovers from lunch. He hoped he wasn’t expected to eat everything. Flonnie and his grandmother (one on a black iron wood-burner, one on a white metal gas stove) went on cooking for the family that had moved out, but kept dropping in.
Raleigh ate alone while his grandmother fed Grandpa Hayes from a tray in their bedroom. Clayton Hayes had already lost both legs from diabetes and now was partially paralyzed by a stroke. He even had to wear diapers. He passed his time in his hospital-style bed or his big wooden wheelchair, conversing with family and neighbors who came to visit, or listening to radio shows, laughing night and day at programs like The Jack Benny Show and Fibber McGee and Molly. To Raleigh’s ears, his grandfather’s laughter closely resembled the idiot Elwood Bragg’s, and was similarly terrifying; his incoherent imitations of language made the boy so uneasy that he always pretended not to hear the invalid calling him over for a hug or a back scratch or a game of checkers. The old man’s motor control was so poor, anyhow, that more often than not he’d upset the checkerboard and they’d have to start all over. Whenever Raleigh saw his father or an aunt or an uncle sit by that metal bed, carefully combing Grandpa Hayes’s thin hair, or bathing his white useless arms with cloths dipped in rubbing alcohol, the boy would wonder if he would ever have to do such awful, intimate things to his own father, and he would vow never to grow old and helpless himself and subjected to the ministrations of others.
While Raleigh ate alone that first night, Flonnie sat on a high stool beside the black mahogany floor-to-ceiling china cabinet, where she was polishing silver napkin rings initialed H. (Napkin rings that the adult Raleigh would have liked to own, but nobody could remember what had happened to them.) While Flonnie scrubbed at the tarnish, she muttered angrily one of the songs she sang when she worked.
Handling Sin Page 15