by Ann Petry
“I won’t let him go,” Mrs. Lord wailed. “I won’t let him go, I won’t let him go. Hubborn, come back, come back.” The “come back” sounded as though it were being sung, on one high note, sustained, repeated.
Mourn all over, she thought. People do, in one way or another.
Then, very quickly, they were all outside on the sidewalk, standing there, and Howard and two other men were shepherding the people into the proper cars, darting in and out, just like sheepdogs, impatiently nosing a group of slowmoving and very stupid sheep over a stile.
Howard turned to Abbie, “Ah, yes, Mrs. Crunch,” he said, taking her by the arm. “Miss Jackson always rides in front with me. So if you’ll get in here. But first,” he opened the back door of the car, “Mrs. Lord, this is Mrs. Crunch. She’s Miss Jackson’s personal representative. She’ll be riding in the front seat with me.”
Mrs. Lord said, “Glad to meet you,” and reached out a blackgloved hand and shook Abbie’s blackgloved hand. It was a surprisingly firm handshake.
“And this is Mr. Angus Lord,” Howard said. “Deacon Lord’s brother.”
“My compliments,” Mr. Angus Lord leaned forward, bowed. Then he sat back and sucked his teeth.
Abbie sat in the front seat of the car, close to the door. She was waiting for Mrs. Lord to start that weird wailing sound again, the back of her neck cold with waiting, her hands in the long-fingered black gloves clenched into fists, hands tense with waiting. Howard started the car, pulled off, following close behind the hearse. Silence in the back seat.
Then Mrs. Lord said petulantly, “Angus, I can’t remember whether I locked my back door.”
Mr. Angus Lord said, “I locked it. It don’t matter anyway. That big dog would keep anybody out ceptin’ a blind man, who was a deaf man, too. A deaf blind man wouldn’t be robbin’ nobody’s house.” Pause. “A lot of folks at the funeral.”
“I didn’t see his cousin. Was she there?”
“I dunno. I ain’t seen her in years.” Pause. “By the way, I’d like his gold watch. For a keepsake.”
“I’m keepsakin’ it myself.” Reproof in Mrs. Lord’s voice. “I figure to keepsake it the rest of my life. Hubborn never give me nothin’ while he was alive and now he’s dead, he can start in. I aims to keepsake his gold watch and his diamond stickpin.”
“He ain’t in his grave,” Mr. Angus Lord said, voice scornful. “You can wait awhile before you start puttin’ bad mouth on him.”
Abbie wondered if the scorn was due to disappointment or to fear of disparaging a dead man, fear so old no one really knew its source. Mrs. Lord had criticized the deacon, “Hubborn never give me nothin’ while he was alive—” Speak no evil of the dead.
She turned her head to look at Mrs. Lord. The heavy black veil still concealed her face, but she had removed the black gloves, had rolled them up into a ball, and was kneading them with one hand, just as though the gloves were a ball of black dough. Mr. Angus Lord was staring out of the window, watching the traffic.
When they slowed down in order to turn in between the gates at the entrance to the cemetery, Abbie found herself thinking about the Major again, and his story about Aunt Hal who had ridden to a funeral astride the hearse, and how the rest of the Crunches shouted, “Whip up them horses! Ride her down! Ride Hal down!”
Then the Reverend Ananias Hill was intoning, “Ashes to ashes—” voice sorrowful, voice sad, voice old, and Mrs. Lord wailed again, “Hubborn, come back, come back to me,” and Reverend Hill went right on intoning, “Dust to dust—”
About five minutes afterwards, Howard was helping Mrs. Lord into the long black car, the nurse was hovering close by. Howard said, “Here, drink this—no—drink it right down—and you’ll feel better—it’s brandy.” Then they were off, leaving the cemetery, going faster and faster.
Mr. Angus Lord said, “I’ll have a little of that likker, young man.” He sucked his teeth, waiting.
Howard stopped the car, reached in the glove compartment, got out the flask, a package of paper cups, handed them back to Mr. Angus Lord, and then started the car, driving even faster now.
Mr. Lord said, “Ah!”
Abbie turned, saw that he was drinking out of the flask, and that he was apparently emptying it; he paused for a moment in his drinking, and then said “Ah!” again.
“Now what might that have been, young man?” he asked.
Howard glanced at Mr. Angus Lord in the mirror. “Hennessy’s Five Star brandy.”
“Five stars. Stars. Thought so,” he said. “Tasted like it.” He smacked his lips. “Was that a colored cemetery, young man?” he asked companionably.
“No,” Howard said. “But in another ten years or so we’ll have that, too. We’ve got two practically colored schools and we’ve got a separate place for the colored to live, and separate places for them to go to church in, and it won’t be long before we’ll work up to a separate place for the colored to lie in after they’re dead. It won’t be long, brother. Then you’ll feel right at home here in Monmouth. It’ll be just like Georgia except for the climate.”
Howard must be angry about something, Abbie thought. That’s no way to talk to a customer. Customer? The customer was dead. They’d just left him there under the hemlocks. Well, it was no way to talk to the customer’s family. Surely Mrs. Lord would resent the reprimanding, sarcastic voice Howard had used. Howard. What was his last name? How many people have I ever known that I called by their first names? What’s his last name? I’ll ask Frances. Maybe he didn’t have one. Maybe he came into the world, broad of hips, fullgrown, fullblown, in his cutaway coat and striped trousers, with his flask of brandy and his derby hat and his gray gloves, and his feather moustache, above that delicatelyshaped, moistlooking, thirstylooking mouth. What had made him angry? Why, the brandy, of course. The late Deacon Lord’s brother had drunk up every drop of Howard’s Five Stars. Then she thought, This whole thing has made me lightheaded, because she was rhyming again, saying over and over, Stars in his crown, to his renown, stars in his crown, to his renown.
The late Deacon Lord’s brother must have been mellowed by the brandy, warmed by it, slightly intoxicated by it, because just as Abbie turned to look at him, he laid his hand on Mrs. Lord’s large wellfleshed knee and said, “I spose you’ll be lookin’ around for another man—”
Mrs. Lord snorted. “Another man? Me? Another man? I could tell you things about Hubborn that would make your hair straighten out just like white folks’ hair.” Pause. “And I’ll thank you to take your black hand off’n my leg.”
Howard said smoothly, “Mind if I turn on the radio?” Music filled the swiftly moving car, jazz music, loud, strongly accented.
By the time they pulled up in front of Mrs. Lord’s house, on the edge of Monmouth, a one-story shingled affair, glassed-in porch across the front, she had removed the black veil and the black gloves. She got out of the car, unassisted, handed Howard a white box edged with black.
Abbie thought, That’s where she put the veil and the gloves.
Mrs. Lord said, “Goodbye, Mrs. Crunch, and thank you. Tell Miss Jackson everything was fine,” and walked heavily toward her front steps, the late Mr. Lord’s brother trailing along behind her.
Howard turned toward Abbie. “Drop you at Number Six?”
“No, thank you. I’ll go back to the funeral parlor with you. I want to see Miss Jackson. She said she’d be back after the service.”
She wondered what J.C. and Miss Doris were doing. Something intractable about Miss Doris. Even the way she used the word “were,” pronouncing it as though it were “wear,” and using it constantly. She was short but not stout, bulky, bulk of a statue. Her face and body looked like wrought iron, both as to color of skin, and an almost metallic hardness of the flesh. Flesh on the face, flesh on the forearms, like iron. Thin legs. Splay feet. She planted her feet flat on the ground when she walked. Even
the voice hard and cold.
J.C. and Miss Doris? He’d be all right. If he could survive Mamie Powther and Shapiro and Kelly, he’d survive Miss Doris too.
“Tell me,” she said to Howard, raising her voice against the sound of the radio. “Why did Mrs. Lord call Deacon Lord ‘Hubborn.’ I thought his first name was Richard.”
“She couldn’t say ‘husband.’ Hubborn was the nearest she could come to it in that loosepalated, liverlipped speech of hers.” He turned the radio off.
He’s still angry about his Five Stars, she thought. “Was she really upset? She seemed so calm, and then all of a sudden she was shrieking like a banshee.”
Howard said, “Yes and no. She didn’t want him back. If by lifting a finger she could bring him back, she’d tie her hands together, bind them, so the fingers couldn’t move, even by reflex action. He was an old devil and she’d been married to him for forty years, married to a little black man who was mean and stingy and malicious. That was Hubborn. Mean.
“When her old mother died, a few years back, he wouldn’t pay for the funeral. The city buried her. He knew a couple of ward heelers and he hollered poor mouth so Mrs. Lord’s mother was dumped into what amounts to an open lot. The old lady had insurance. All these old folks have enough insurance to give ’em a pretty good funeral. They save pennies and nickels to pay for their insurance, pay for it by the week. Well, anyway, Mrs. Lord’s old mother got a pine box, no extras, just a box. The city paid for it and we took care of the arrangements. That’s how I know about it. The old lady got a plain pine box and the box was put in potter’s field. Hubborn took the five hundred dollars from the insurance and bought himself a diamond and had one of the local jewelers set it in a gold stickpin.
“He was a great man for gold, Hubborn was. He was a thirty-third-degree Mason, too, and he kept the colored Masons in such a state of confusion and muddlement that they’ve never been able to buy a home. They rent one of those storefronts one night a week, and on the other nights the members of the I Will Arise and Follow Thee Praise the Lord for Making Me Colored and Not White Church sing hallelujah in it.
“No, she wouldn’t bring him back. But he was alive one minute with his gold teeth flashing, and his gambler’s cufflinks gleaming, ten-dollar gold piece in each one, and his diamond stickpin glittering, and his bright yellow ties shining and the next minute he was dead. So Mrs. Lord now has his gold cufflinks and his undeaconly diamond stickpin and his gold watch tucked in her black bosom—for keepsakin’.”
He stopped talking, lit a cigarette, and Abbie thought he had finished. Then he said, indifferently, “Maybe she screamed because she was afraid she was dreaming, afraid that she would wake up and find that Hubborn was still alive. Or perhaps she saw herself as she would ultimately be, very dead, very cold, lying in a coffin, a satin-lined one, of course.”
He gave her a sly sidewise glance, and she thought, This is an assumed callousness and I shall ignore it. He is trying to give me the impression that he is so accustomed to the idea of death that he can speak of coffins and satin linings, and go on smoking, and looking around him as he drives, as though none of it really mattered, as though it had nothing to do with him.
They were going down Franklin Avenue. The street was still filled with people, mostly women, all of whom were carrying bundles, or packages. They had finished their Saturday shopping, had finished exchanging a week’s wages for clothes, groceries, liquor.
When he stopped the car in front of the F. K. Jackson Funeral Home, she got out quickly, before he could help her, deliberately ignoring his outstretched hand.
“By the way,” she said abruptly, “what is your last name?”
“Thomas. Good old Anglo-Saxon last name. All of us black sub rosa Anglo-Saxons are named Stevens, Jackson, Williams, Smith, King.”
“I’ll tell Miss Jackson how well you managed everything, Mrs. Thomas.” Heavens, what kind of a slip of the tongue was that? She started to say, What could I have been thinking of, I mean Mr. Thomas; but he appeared not to have noticed. He was kicking one of the front tires, trying to dislodge the mud that had spattered on its white walls.
“Muck,” he muttered. “Graveyard muck.”
Then he opened the door of the car, reached deep inside the glove compartment, took out a package, tore off the green paper wrappings, then the thin white paper underneath, clawing at it in his haste, got a corkscrew out of his pocket, pulled the cork out of the bottle.
“Can’t do this on the job,” he said, “but if you’ll excuse me.” He gave a slight shudder and poured half the contents of the bottle down his throat in one great swallowless draft. She walked away from him so that she would not see the second great draft go down his throat, the draft that would unquestionably empty the bottle.
14
* * *
FRANCES JACKSON leaned over and kissed Abbie. Then she said, “Abbie! Come in, come in. Are you all right?”
“Why, of course. And you? Are you all right?”
“Never been better. Come in the living room. Let me take your coat and your cape. And your hat. Take off your hat, Abbie. Here, give it to me.” Holding the coat, the cape, the muff, under one arm, she took the hat in her hand, turned it around. “You know, this outfit makes you look like a duchess.”
“The Ugly Duchess?” Abbie said, and laughed.
“No. The Duchess of Kent. But older and mellower. Don’t sit there, Abbie. Sit in the armchair near the fire. It’s much more comfortable.”
Abbie watched her quick, nervous movements, and thought She’s wound up like a spring from the hustle and bustle, the ordering around that she experienced in South Carolina. She’s even dressed to suit this ordering-around mood. Straight black skirt. White blouse. The blouse cut almost like a man’s shirt. French cuffs on the blouse. Cufflinks in them. And the gray hair brushed back, away from her forehead, the pince-nez set perfectly straight on her nose. President of the corporation. An austere face. Bony, distinguished. The eyes behind the glasses looked small, shrewd, very wise. Tall bony body. Unrelaxed body. She keeps walking up and down because she’s still traveling, still managing the family, offering advice, remembering all the details, the insurance papers, the will.
Frances placed the coat, the cape, the muff, the hat on the horsehair sofa. “I feel just like a world traveler,” she said. “I flew down and came back on the train. Do you know, I enjoyed it? It was like a twenty-four-hour holiday, a vacation spent in a different part of the world. Everything different. The customs. The people. The language. On the train, coming back, I began to wonder whether it’s a good idea to read as much as I do, to see as many plays, because I don’t think I really saw the city of Charleston, even though I was there. I kept seeing Crown and Porgy and Bess and Sportin’ Life and Catfish Alley. Isn’t that funny?”
I wish she’d stop walking up and down, Abbie thought, she’ll never unwind if she doesn’t sit.
“And if I ever go to London, I know I won’t see the English people as they really are. I’ll see Oliver Twist and Fagin, and David Copperfield and Little Nell,” Frances said, still pacing.
“What about Monmouth? What do you see in Monmouth, Frances?” She’ll have to sit down to answer that. I keep seeing Link as a little boy, keep hearing the Major talk, keep using his phrases. Bulletheaded. Meriney. “When I mourns, I mourns all over.”
“Monmouth?” Frances said, and sat down in the wing chair on the other side of the fireplace. Wing chair upholstered in a velvet that reminded Abbie of the dark green plush used on trains.
“Monmouth?” Frances repeated, and leaned back in the chair. The light from the fire was reflected in her glasses. “I see my father. I see myself walking down Franklin Avenue, holding on to his hand, and he’s saying, ‘Frank, you know you’ve got a man’s mind.’ Anywhere I go here in Monmouth, I can always see myself—too tall, too thin, too bony. Even at twelve. And too bright, Abbie, and u
nable and unwilling to conceal the fact that I had brains. When I finished high school I went to college, to Wellesley, where I was a kind of Eighth Wonder of the world because I was colored. I hadn’t been there very long when the dean sent for me and asked me if I was happy there. I looked straight at her and I said, ‘My father didn’t send me here to be happy, he sent me here to learn.’ I have always remembered the look of astonishment that came over her face. Then she said, ‘I would like to know your father.’”
Abbie thought, We’re both getting old. We tell the same stories, over and over again. We’ve influenced each other in the telling. Shared experience, I suppose. Tell it and retell it. And finally act on it. Happiness not important. It’s the learning, the education. Magic wand. Golden key. I thought it would be that for Link, too. And he works in a bar. And stays out all night. Playing poker. And doing what else? Where does he go?
“Twenty-two, and I was back in Monmouth. A college graduate. All hung over with honors and awards and prizes. And I knew I’d never get married, never have any children. So I was going to be a doctor.” She laughed, and the pince-nez trembled on her nose, glittering and trembling there. “But by then my mother had been dead for three years. My father was alone here, and I couldn’t bear to leave him, and there was the business that he had built up so slowly and so carefully. So I became an undertaker too. What do I see in Monmouth, Abbie? I see myself, lonely and a little bitter until I met you,” a barely noticeable pause, and she added, “and the Major. I see myself at twenty-five going to the casket company to pick out my father’s casket and I hear the Irishman who owned the place saying to his pimplyfaced clerk, ‘That nigger woman undertaker from Washington Street is here again, see what she wants.’ At the time it happened I found it unbearable. Now I feel indebted to the man because the sound of the word nigger has never bothered me since then, though I have never been able to share your enthusiasm for the Irish.”