by Ann Petry
“You god damn conjurin’ whore!” Jones said.
His voice was thick with violence and with something else—almost like a sob had risen in his throat and got mixed up with the words. She stared at him, bewildered, reassuring herself that it was he who had made the hissing sound, that she was not back in the country, but instead was facing Jones in this small, dark room.
She was surprised to see that he had backed away from her. There was half the distance of the room between them. He was over by the desk, and his hands were no longer lifted in a threatening gesture; they were flat against his face. The sight held her motionless, unable to deny or affirm his charge of conjuring.
He walked out of the room without looking at her. She ought to explain why she had come back so unexpectedly, but he had reached the foyer before she could get the words out.
“My heart was botherin’ me,” she said in her whispering voice. He made no reply, and she wasn’t certain whether he had heard her. The door slammed with a bang, and then he was going up the stairs—walking slowly as though he was having trouble with his legs.
She cocked her head on one side listening, because the room was filled with whispers, and it was her own voice saying over and over again, “My heart was botherin’ me,” “My heart was botherin’ me.” It had a gasping, faintly surprised quality, and she realized with dismay that she was saying the words aloud over and over again and that her heart was making a sound like thunder inside her chest.
Her legs were shaking so badly that she walked over to the sofa and sat down. This was where he slept when she was in the bedroom alone. It was a long sofa, very long, and yet tall as he was, when he was stretched out on it, his head would be about where she was sitting and his feet would have touched the arm at the other end. She wondered if he had been comfortable or had he twisted and turned unable to sleep because he didn’t have room enough. She punched the seat with her fist. It didn’t have much give to it.
What would he have done if she had come and lain down beside him on this sofa on one of those nights when she couldn’t sleep? Only, of course, her pride wouldn’t have permitted it—especially after that experience with the nightgown. She squirmed as she thought of its bright pinkness, its low cut, and of the vivid yellow lace that edged the neck and the armholes.
She had looked at it a long time in the store before she finally bought it. It was the same store where she’d got that nice flowered dress, only this time the lady wasn’t there, and the white girl who waited on her got a little impatient with her, but she had a hard time making up her mind because she’d never worn anything like it before and it didn’t look decent.
“But it’s so beautiful, honey,” the girl urged. Her long red fingernails had picked up a bit of the lace edging.
“I dunno,” Min had said doubtfully.
“And it’s glamorous. See?” The girl held it up in front of herself, catching it in tight at her waist and holding the neck up with her other hand, so that her breasts were suddenly accentuated, seemed to be pushing right out of the bright pink material.
Min looked away, embarrassed. “I ain’t never wore one of them kind.”
“Why, honey, you’ve missed half of life.” The girl moved her shoulders slightly to attract Min’s glance. Min’s eyes stayed focused on the front of the store and the girl stretched the nightgown out on the counter, started putting it back into its crisp folds, and said impatiently, “Well, honey?”
“I still dunno.” The shiny pink material, the yellow lace, the gathers at the bosom, were startling even spread out flat on the counter.
The girl sought desperately for some way to close the sale. “Why—why——” she fumbled, then, “Why, any man who sees you in this would get all excited right away.”
Two-ninety-eight it had cost, and she remembered with a pang of regret how that night after she bought it she had put it on. It was a little too long and she had to walk carefully to keep from tripping, but she made several totally unnecessary trips back and forth through the living room, walking as close as possible to the sofa where Jones was sitting. He was so absorbed in some gloomy chain of thought that he didn’t pay any attention until she stumbled over the hem and nearly fell.
“Jesus God!” he said, staring.
But after that first look, he had kept his eyes on the floor, head down, unseeing, apparently indifferent. The only indication that he wasn’t wholly unconcerned showed in the way he started cracking his knuckles, pulling his fingers so that the joints made a sharp, angry sound.
No, she could never have brought herself to lie down on this couch with him, and anyway she ought to start packing. Her house dresses and the pink nightgown and the other ordinary nightgowns could go in a paper bundle along with her shoes and slippers and spring coat and what else—oh, yes, the Epsom salts for her feet. The comb and brush and hand mirror could go in the same package. That was about all except for the cross and the table and the canary cage. She wouldn’t really need the medicine dropper and that red don’t-love medicine the Prophet gave her, but she’d take them, because she might run across some friend with husband trouble who could use them.
Funny how she got to believe that not having to pay rent was so important, and it really wasn’t. Having room to breathe in meant much more. Lately she couldn’t get any air here. All the time she felt like she’d been running, running, running, and hadn’t been able to stop long enough to get a nose full of air. It was because of the evilness in Jones. She could feel the weight of it like some monstrous growth crowding against her. He had made the whole apartment grow smaller and darker; living room, bedroom, kitchen—all of them shrinking, their walls tightening about her.
Like just now when he came at her with his hand upraised to strike; he had swallowed the room up until she could see nothing but him—all the detail of the overalls and none of the room, just as though he had become a giant and blotted out everything else.
These past few weeks she had become so acutely aware of his presence that his every movement made her heart jump, whether she was in the bedroom or the kitchen. Every sound he made was magnified. His muttering to himself was like thunder, and his restless walking up and down, up and down, in the living room seemed to go on inside her in a regular rhythm that set her eyes to blinking so that she couldn’t stop them. When he beat the dog, it made her sick at her stomach, because as each blow fell the dog cried out sharply and her stomach would suck in against itself.
But when he had been quiet and no sound came from him, she felt impelled to locate him. The absence of sound was deeply disturbing, for there was no telling what awful thing he might be doing.
If she was in the kitchen, she would keep turning her head, listening, while she scrubbed the floor or cleaned the stove, until, unable to endure not knowing where he was or what he was doing, she would finally tiptoe to the living-room door only to find that he was sitting here on this sofa, biting his lips, glaring at her with eyes so bloodshot, so filled with hate, that she would turn and scuttle hastily back to the kitchen. Or if she was in the bedroom she would sit on the edge of the bed, watching the doorway, half-expecting to see him appear there suddenly, and then the silence from the living room would force her to get up and look at him only to find his hate-filled eyes focused straight at her.
She got up from the sofa, satisfied. She had full made up her mind now and she would never regret going, for there wasn’t anything else for her to do. He was more than flesh and blood could bear.
She carefully inspected the kitchen to make certain none of her belongings were there and then entered the bathroom where she took a five-pound package of Epsom salts from under the sink. There was nothing of hers in the living room but the table and the canary’s cage.
On her way into the bedroom, she glanced at the top of Jones’ desk. He hadn’t finished tearing up the letters and she looked at them curiously. He never got any mail that she k
new of and these weren’t advertising letters, they were regular ones with handwritten addresses.
She picked up two of the envelopes. The names had been partly torn off, and she traced what remained of the writing with her finger, spelling each letter out separately. None of them were for Jones. One envelope was almost intact, and she saw with surprise that it wasn’t intended for this house. It belonged in a house across the street near the corner, that house where there were so many children and dogs that they overran the sidewalk and every time she went past it, whether it was morning or night, she had to pick her way along to keep from bumping into them.
But if it belonged across the street, what was it doing on Jones’ desk? Perhaps the people were friends of his or maybe they were going to rent an apartment here and had dropped the letters when they came to pay a deposit or perhaps Jones had stolen them from a mail box.
And at the thought the envelopes slid out of her hands, landing on the floor. She was too frightened to pick them up. And what was it he had said when she came in and found him tearing them into little pieces? What was it—“What you doin’ spyin’ on me?”
Jones was doing something crooked. He was up to something that was bad. He had been ready to kill her just now because he thought she had found him out. If there had been any part of her that felt a reluctance about leaving the security that his apartment had offered, it disappeared entirely now, for she knew she would never be safe here again.
She walked carefully around the envelopes, entered the bedroom. There was the packing to be done and she would do it swiftly, so that she could be gone. She knelt on the bed and lifted the cross down, dusting it carefully with her hand. It should be wrapped in something soft to keep it safe. The pink nightgown, of course. It was new and silky and highly suitable. And she would wrap her house dresses and underwear and shoes and the slippers in with it. She would wear her galoshes because it was going to snow.
She transferred the protection powder from the pocket of her house dress to her coat pocket and then put the comb and brush, a hand mirror, and a towel on the bed near the cross. Mis’ Crane would probably be mad because she hadn’t come to work today. She got mad easy. Well, she’d tell her there was sickness in the family. It was true, too. Jones was sick; at least he certainly wasn’t what you’d call well and healthy, so he must be sick.
She added her spring coat, a straw hat, and a felt hat to the pile of items on the bed. She brought newspapers from the kitchen to wrap them in. It was going to be a pretty large bundle, and she decided to make two separate packages and wrap the cross and the house dresses by themselves. She would carry that package, because these pushcart men were very careless and sometimes let things slip off the back of their carts.
The closet floor was dusty. She wiped it up with a damp rag and then scrubbed it with scouring powder until the boards had a bleached, new look that pleased her. When she straightened up, she started to wipe her hands on the sides of her dress and halted the motion abruptly. She was still wearing her coat, had the woolen scarf tied over her head.
“I musta known all along I was going,” she said, aloud. “Never even took my hat and coat off.”
The doorbell rang with a sudden loud shrilling that stabbed through her. She jumped and gave a frightened exclamation. Immediately she thought of Jones and her breathing quickened until she was gasping. Then the fear in her died. He never rang the bell. It must be the moving man that Mis’ Hedges had sent.
She went to the door. “Who is it?” she said. He must be a heavy-handed man, a strong man from the vigorous way he’d pushed the bell.
“Pushcart man,” the voice was deep, impatient, almost a growl.
She opened the door. “Come in,” she said, and led him toward the living room, talking to him over her shoulder. “It’s the big table, the canary cage, and a bundle. I’ll go get the bundle. The little one I’ll carry myself, and how much will it be?”
She brought the big bundle out and put it on top of Jones’ desk.
“This all?”
“Yes,” she said, and looked him over carefully. He had wide strong shoulders, though he wasn’t very tall. His skin was weather-beaten, so that the dark brown of it had a reddish cast as though he had plenty of sun on him. “Only the table is heavy. The other things is light,” she said.
“How far they go?”
She wasn’t going to live on this street or very close to it and she searched her memory of other near-by streets. A couple of blocks up near Seventh Avenue she had seen signs in the windows, “Lady Boarder Wanted”—she’d try there first.
“’Bout two blocks.”
“Three dollars,” he said. And then, as though he felt impelled to justify the price, “That there table weighs more than most folks’ furniture put together.”
“All right.”
She held the door open while he struggled through it with the big table on his back. He went very slowly, so slowly that she grew impatient and kept looking up the stairs, afraid that Jones might have finished painting and would come down them before she got moved good. Then the pushcart man got the table out to the street and came back and picked up the big bundle and the canary cage.
“I’ll be right out,” she said. “You wait, because I’ll be going along with the things.”
He went out the door and she walked over to Jones’ desk and laid the doorkey in the middle of it, where he couldn’t possibly miss it when he sat down there. She stared at the key. She had held it in her hand when she left for work in the morning, because the last thing she did before she went out was to make sure she had it with her; and at night, too, she’d clutched it tight in her hand when she approached the door on her return. Leaving it here like this meant that she was saying good-bye to the security she had known; meant, too, that she couldn’t come back, never intended coming back, no matter what the future held for her.
She ought to be going. What was it that held her here staring at this key? It was only a doorkey. She had her mind full made up to go. It wasn’t safe here any more, she couldn’t stand Jones any more. She looked around the room impatiently, seeking what it was that held her here while the pushcart man waited outside, while the danger of Jones coming into the apartment increased with every passing moment.
The trouble was she didn’t know why she was going. Why was it? There was something that she hadn’t satisfactorily figured out, some final conclusion that she hadn’t reached. Ah, yes, and as this last full meaning dawned on her, she sighed. It was because if she stayed here she would die—not necessarily that Jones would kill her, not because it was no longer safe here, but because being shut up with the fury of him in this small space would eventually kill her.
“And a body’s got the right to live,” she said softly.
When she walked away from the desk, she didn’t look back at the key. But she paused in the doorway filled with a faint regret that there wasn’t anyone for her to say good-bye to, because a leave-taking somehow wasn’t complete without a friend to say farewell, and in all this house she didn’t know a soul well enough to say an official good-bye to them.
But there was Mis’ Hedges. She walked briskly out of the door at the thought. Once outside, she verified the safety of the big varnish-shiny table. The pushcart was drawn up close to the curb and the table was slung atop of it. The ornate carved feet were up in the air. She saw with satisfaction that practically every woman who walked past paused to admire it; their eyes lingered on the carving, then they drew closer as they enviously estimated its length.
If she hadn’t put a dark cover over Dickie-Boy’s cage, everyone passing could have seen that, too, and their mouths would have watered. Too bad she had covered it, but if she hadn’t he would have been excited by his strange surroundings and probably stopped singing for a week or more.
She turned toward Mrs. Hedges. “I come to say good-bye,” she said.
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��You goin’, dearie?” Mrs. Hedges looked at the large newspaper-wrapped bundle under Min’s arm.
Min nodded. “Prophet kept me from being put out, but I don’t want to stay no more.” Then her voice dropped so low that Mrs. Hedges had to strain to hear what she was saying. “Jones really ain’t bearable no more,” she said apologetically. She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was louder. “Well, good-bye now,” she said, and smiled widely so that her toothless gums were revealed.
“Jones know you’re leavin’?”
“No. I didn’t see no point in telling him.”
“Well, good-bye, dearie.”
“See you,” Min said. And then loudly, clearly, very distinctly she said again, “Well, good-bye now.”
She walked near the curb, following the table’s slow progress up the street. The table was heavy and the man had to lean all his weight on the handles of the cart in order to push it. With his legs braced like that, he looked like a horse pulling a heavy load. Well, he wouldn’t have far to go, just a couple of blocks or so.
As she trudged along beside the cart, her thoughts turned to Jones; maybe if he’d had more sun on him he would have been different. After that time he’d tried to pull Mis’ Johnson down in the cellar, he just got worse and worse. That was a terrible night, what with Mis’ Johnson screaming and that long skirt all twisted around her and so dark near the cellar door that the two of them looked like something in a bad dream the way you’d remember it the next morning when you woke up.
Actually today was the first time Jones had gone for her since she went to the Prophet, because of course with the kind of protection she had it was only natural that he wouldn’t try to put his hands on her. She gripped the bundle more tightly, searching for the shape of the cross through the softness of the dresses, felt for the protection powder in her coat pocket.
She looked at the pushcart man again. A woman living alone didn’t stand much chance. Now this was a strong man and about her age from the wiry gray hair near his temples; willing to work, too, for this work he was doing was hard.