by Ann Petry
He picked up his coffee cup, suddenly suspicious. There seemed to be traces of the same acrid odor, fainter, to be sure, but still there in the cup. He smelt the contents of the big enameled coffee pot that was sitting on the stove and put it down, frowning. He still couldn’t be sure, but there seemed to be traces of the same odor, diluted down, much fainter, but definitely there. It might be his imagination, and on the other hand it might have been only that his nose was full of the sharp smell of the red liquid and so he thought he found it again in his coffee cup and in the big pot.
She wouldn’t dare put anything in his coffee. She wouldn’t dare. How did he know? The candles and the cross returned sharply to his mind. For all he knew she had been working some kind of conjure on him all along, trying to bring him bad luck.
He picked up the slender vial and the medicine dropper and went toward the bedroom. He didn’t go all the way into the room. He stood in the doorway.
Min was tying a triangular, faded wool scarf over her head. She had her coat on and her movements were slow, clumsy, awkward. Her galoshes were fastened tightly around her feet and he thought nobody but a half-wit would get dressed backward like that. She saw him in the door and she put one hand into her coat pocket, leaving the ends of the scarf dangling loose.
“What’s this for?”—he held the bottle and medicine dropper out toward her. “You been putting this in my coffee? You been trying to mess with me?”
“It’s my heart medicine,” she said calmly.
He stared at her, not believing her and not knowing why he didn’t believe her. She didn’t shrink away from him, she stared back giving him look for look, and with her hand in her coat pocket she had a slightly jaunty air that made him want to strike her.
“What’s the matter with your heart?”
“I don’t know. Doctor gave me that for it.”
“What do you do with it?”
“Put it in my coffee.”
“Why ain’t there no doctor’s label on it?” he asked suspiciously.
“He said it don’t need one. Couldn’t mix that bottle up with no other one.”
He still wasn’t satisfied. “When’d you see him?”
“The night I went out.”
He didn’t believe her. She was lying. She looked like she was lying. She didn’t have nothing the matter with her heart. If it wasn’t for that cross—he located it out of the corner of his eye. Yes. It was still there over the bed, and he turned his eyes away from it quickly, sorry that he had looked at it, for he would be seeing the damn thing before him everywhere he looked the rest of the day.
“Well, keep it in here,” he said hastily. He entered the room, laid the bottle and the medicine dropper down on the bureau and walked away quickly. “Don’t have it out there in the kitchen. I don’t want to look at it. Or smell it.” He said the words over his shoulder.
When she emerged from the bedroom a few minutes later, the scarf tied tightly under her chin, her house dress wrapped up in a brown-paper bag that she carried under one arm, he refused to glance in her direction.
“Well, good-bye,” she said hesitantly.
He grunted by way of answer, thinking that he had been so confused at the sight of the cross he hadn’t asked her what the candles were for. They didn’t have anything to do with her heart. He hadn’t planned to ask her about the cross, because he couldn’t have brought himself to question her about it; mentioning it aloud would have given it importance. It would never do for her to know what it had done to him.
He went outside to bring in the garbage cans. He stood against the building looking up and down the street. It had snowed during the night—a light, feathery coating that clung to the brick all up and down the street, gently obscuring the dirt, covering the sidewalk with a delicate film of white. He eyed it, thinking that it wouldn’t call for any shoveling. A couple of hours and it would be gone just from folks walking on it.
The Sanitation Department trucks rumbled up to the curb. The street was filled with the rattle and bang of garbage cans, the churning sound of the mechanism inside the trucks as it sucked up the refuse and rubbish from the big metal cans.
There was a steadily increasing stream of women passing through the street. They were going to work. Most of them, like Min, carried small brown bundles under their arms—bundles that contained the shapeless house dresses they would put on when they reached their jobs. Some of them scurried toward the subway entrance, hurrying faster and faster because they were late. Others plodded past slowly with their heads down as though already tired because the burden of the day’s work had settled about their shoulders, weighing them down before they had even begun it.
Jones rolled his empty garbage cans into the areaway and returned to stand in front of the building. In the mornings like this he was usually inside working, shaking the furnace, firing it, taking out ashes. The street had a pleasant, lively look this morning. The sun had come out, and what with the light coating of snow he felt a faint stirring of pleasure as he stood there. Just this one day he ought not to do a lick of work in the house, let the fire go out, leave the halls full of rubbish while he stayed outside and enjoyed himself.
As he watched the street, he saw that there were young, brisk-walking women among the plodding, older women. Some of them had well-shaped legs that quivered where the flesh curved to form the calf. His eyes lingered on one of them as she moved toward the corner at a smart pace that set her flesh to jiggling pleasantly.
“Right nice legs, ain’t she, dearie?” Mrs. Hedges inquired from the window.
He gave her one quick look of hate and then turned his head away. Even early in the morning she was there in that window like she’d been glued to it. She was drinking a cup of coffee, and he wished that while he was standing there she would suddenly gag on it, choke, and die before his very eyes. So that he could stand over her and laugh. He couldn’t remain out here with her looking at him. His pleasure in the morning and in the street faded, died as though it had never been.
There was nothing for him to do but go inside. He wanted to get some more air and look around a bit. He wasn’t ready to go in yet. He wasn’t going to let her drive him away. He was going to stand there until he got good and ready to go. He was uncomfortably aware of her unwinking gaze and he shifted his feet, thinking he couldn’t bear it. He would have to go back in the house to get away from it.
His eye caught the postman’s slow progress up the street. His gray uniform disappeared in and out of the doorways. Each time he appeared, Jones noticed how the heavy mail sack slung over his shoulder pulled him over on one side, weighing him down. Watching him, Jones decided he would stay right there until the postman reached this building. That way the old sow wouldn’t know she had chased him inside.
Post-office trucks backed into the street, turned and moved off with a grinding of gears. Children scampering to school were added to the stream of people passing by. The movement in the street increased with each passing moment, and he cursed Mrs. Hedges because he wanted to enjoy it and couldn’t with her sitting there in the window watching him.
The superintendent next door came out to sweep the sidewalk in front of his building. Jones saw him with relief. He walked over to talk to him, welcoming the opportunity to put even a short distance between himself and Mrs. Hedges. This way she couldn’t possibly think she had driven him off.
“Kind of late this morning, ain’t you?” the man asked.
“Overslept myself.”
“Sure glad this wasn’t a heavy snow.”
“Yeah. Don’t know whether snow or coal is worse.” Jones was enjoying this brief chat. It proved to Mrs. Hedges that he was completely indifferent to her presence in the window. He searched for something humorous to say so that they could laugh and the laughter would further show how unconcerned he was. He elaborated on the theme of snow and coal, “Got to shovel both of ’em.
One time when white is just as evil as black. Snow and coal. Both bad. One white and the other black.”
The sound of the other man’s laughter was infectious. The people passing by paused and smiled when they heard it. The man clapped Jones on the back and roared. And Jones discovered with regret that the hate and the anger that still burned inside him was so great that he couldn’t even smile with the man, let alone join in his laughter. And the laughter died in the other man’s throat when he looked at Jones’ sullen face.
The man went back to sweeping the sidewalk and Jones waited for the approach of the postman. He was next door. In a minute he’d turn into this house. Yes. He was coming out now.
“Well, I gotta go.”
“See you later.”
He followed the postman into the hall, feeling triumphant. It was quite obvious to Mrs. Hedges that he had simply come inside to get his mail, not because of her looking at him. Then he felt chagrined because knowing everything like she did she probably knew, too, that he never got any mail.
The postman opened all the letter boxes at once, using a key that he had suspended on a long, stout chain. The sagging leather pouch that was swung over his shoulder bulged with mail. He thrust letters into the open boxes, used the key again to lock them and was gone.
Jones made no effort to open his box. There wasn’t any point, for the postman hadn’t put anything in it. He stood transfixed by the wonder of what he was thinking. Because he had found what he wanted. This was the way to get the kid. Not even Junto with all his money could get the kid out of it. The more he thought about it, the more excited he became. If the kid should steal letters out of mail boxes, nobody, not even Junto, could get him loose from a rap like that. Because it was the Government.
The thought occupied him for the rest of the morning. It was foremost in his mind while he shook down the furnace, carried out ashes, even while he put a washer in a faucet on the second floor and cleaned out a clogged drain pipe on the third floor.
During the afternoon he studied the mail box keys in his possession, taking them out of the box where he kept them and strewing them over the top of his desk. These were duplicates of the keys that the tenants had. He pondered over them. He had to figure out a master key—make the pattern for a master key. He didn’t have to make the key himself, the key man up the street could turn it out in no time at all, there wasn’t anything complicated about a mail-box key.
He went next door to see his friend, the super, in response to a sudden inspiration.
“Lissen,” he said craftily. “Let me borrow one of your mail-box keys for a minute. Damn woman in my house has lost two keys in two days. None of my other keys will work in her box. I thought one of yours might work. She’s having a fit out there in the hall wanting to get her mail.”
“Sure,” the man said. “Come on downstairs. I’ll get one for you.”
Jones tried the key in the boxes in the hall. With just a little forcing it worked. He looked at it in surprise. Perhaps it would work anywhere on the street. He would have liked to ask the man if it was a master key, but he didn’t dare.
He spent the rest of the afternoon drawing careful outlines of the keys. Then he evolved one that seemed to embody all the curves and twists of the others. It was slow work, for his hands were clumsy, sometimes the pencil slipped in his haste. Once his hands trembled so that he had to stop and put the pencil down until the trembling ceased.
The final pattern pleased him inordinately. He held it up and studied it, surprised. This last, final drawing wasn’t really a copy. It was his own creation. He was reluctant to put it down, to let it go out of his hands. He picked it up again and again to admire it.
“I shoulda took up drawing,” he said, aloud.
He held it away from him, turned it around, until finally, half-closing his eyes and staring at it, he thought he saw a horizontal line across the length of the drawing. He threw it down on the desk in disgust, his pleasure in it destroyed.
Was he going through life seeking the outline of a cross in everything about him? Min had done this to him. There were other things she had done to him which he probably didn’t even begin to suspect. He thought of her standing in front of the bureau whispering, “It’s for my heart,” strangely unafraid, almost as though she had some kind of protection that she knew would prevent him from doing violence to her.
She had changed lately, now that he thought about it. She dominated the apartment. She cleaned it tirelessly, filled with some unknown source of strength that surged through her and showed up in numberless, subtle ways. She was always scrubbing and cleaning the apartment just as though it were hers, and then beaming approval at the result of her effort, so that her toothless gums showed as she smiled at her own handiwork.
Suddenly he laughed out loud. The dog pricked up his ears, scrambled to his feet, and came to where Jones was sitting at the desk and thrust his muzzle into his hand. Jones patted the dog’s head in a rare gesture of affection.
Because he was going to fix Min, too. Min was going to take the drawing to the key man and get the master key made. There would be nothing, no scrap of evidence, no tiny detail to connect him with this thing. Even if the kid should say that he, Jones, had showed him how to open the boxes, had given him the key, all he had to do was deny it. He had been Super on this street for years, collecting rents and scrupulously turning them over to the white agents. That alone was proof of his honesty. No one would believe the story of a thieving little kid—a little kid whose mother was no better than she should be, whose mother openly lived with white men.
No. They’d never be able to pin anything on him. It would be the kid. And if things worked out right, it would be Min, too.
When Min came home from work that night, he greeted her cordially but not too cordially, because he didn’t want her to wonder what had made him change his attitude toward her.
“Your heart bother you today?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She looked at him distrustfully. “Not much anyway,” she added hastily.
“I was wondering about it.” He hoped she would think that this concern about her heart accounted for his cordiality because he had been going out of the house almost as soon as she came home from work, not saying anything, deliberately waiting until she entered the living room and then brushing past her in order to show his distaste for her, thus making it obvious that he was hastening to get away from the sight of her.
She took off her coat and hung it up in the bedroom, shaking it carefully after it was on the hanger. When she unfastened the scarf around her head, she looked at herself in the mirror and automatically she sought the reflection of the cross hanging over the bed.
“Supper’ll be ready in a minute,” she said cautiously.
“Okay.” He stood up, yawned, went through an elaborate, exaggerated stretching. “I’m good and hungry.” He was beginning to enjoy himself.
He went to stand in the kitchen door while she set the table, talking to her companionably as she moved from table to stove. Gradually the faint suspicion, the slow caution in her face and in her eyes lessened, and then disappeared entirely. It was replaced by a quiet pleasure that grew until her face was alive with it. She talked and talked and talked. Words welled up in her, overflowed, filled the kitchen.
He ate in silence, wondering if he would ever be able to get the sound of her flat, sing-song voice out of his ears. It went on and on. He lost all sense of what she was saying, though in sheer self-defense he made the effort to catch it. It was like trying to follow the course of a tortuously winding path that continually turned back on itself, disappeared in impenetrable thickets, to emerge farther on at a sharp angle having no apparent relation to its original starting point.
“Mis’ Crane’s got three of the smallest kittens. Just born a month ago and the canned milk don’t agree with them. So when we got to the rug on the living room we hadn
’t any of the soap chips. The man at the store said that kind is gone over to the war. And I got bacon there. A whole half pound. Mis’ Crane was surprised because Mr. Crane has it for breakfast every morning. The drippings make the greens have a nice taste, don’t they? Them Eighth Avenue stores is the only place that’s got ones that have a strong taste. And the collards was fresh in this afternoon so I got it for tomorrow——”
Finally he gave up the effort to follow the train of her thought. She wouldn’t know whether he really listened or not. He nodded his head occasionally which satisfied her.
After supper he wiped the dishes, and the fact that he was standing near her, staying there to help her, increased the flow of her words until it was like a river in full flood.
He lay down on the sofa in the living room while she went through such elaborate and long-drawn-out, totally unnecessary cleaning that he couldn’t control his impatience as he listened to and identified her movements. She was scrubbing the kitchen floor, washing out the oven, scouring the jets of the gas stove.
Finally she came to sit in the big chair in the living room, her eyes blinking with pleasure as she looked at the canary and talked to him. She was breathless from her scouring of the kitchen and she talked in gasps and spurts. “Cheek! Cheek! Dickie-boy. You going to sing, Dickie-boy? Cluk! Cluk! Dickie-boy!”
“Min,” he said, and stopped because that wasn’t the right tone of voice. It was too charged with urgency, too solemn, too emphasized. He had to keep his voice casual; make what he was saying sound unimportant and yet important enough for her to get dressed and go out again.
Her head turned toward him as though it were on a swivel. There was a slight rigidity in her posture as she waited for him to continue.
Jones sat up and put his hand on his head. “I got a awful headache,” he said. “And I got to have a mail-box key made for one of them damn fools on the third floor. She done lost two keys in two days and I ain’t got another one. I was wondering if you’d take the pattern around to the key man and wait while he made it.”