by Lorrie Moore
But I’d go back to my lawful spouse! Miss Callie hollers at me through the bars. You or I or the man in the moon got no business living in that little hot upstairs room with a western exposure at Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s for all the pride on earth, not in August.
After work I was always staying to cut the grass in Mrs. Judge’s backyard, so it would be cooler for Bella. It kept the fleas away from her a little. None of it did much good. The heat held on. After I went back to the Starks, the men were playing, still playing croquet with a few little girls, and the women had taken off to themselves, stretched out on the screen porch. They called Maideen, I sent her in to them. It was the long Mississippi evening, the waiting till it was cool enough to eat. The voice of Jinny’s mama carried—I heard it—her reminiscent one—but the evening was quiet, very hot and still.
Somebody called, You’re dead on Lonnie. It was just a little Williams girl in pigtails.
I may have answered with a joke. I felt lighthearted, almost not serious at all, really addressing a child, as I lifted my mallet—the one with the red band that had always been mine. I brought Dugan to earth with it. He went down and shook the ground, fanning the air as he went. He toppled and sighed. Then I beat his whole length and his head with that soft girl’s hair and all the schemes, beat him without stopping my mallet till every bone and little bone, all the way down to the little bones in the hand, flew to pieces. I beat Lonnie Dugan till there was nothing to know there. And I proved the male body—it has a too certain, too special shape to it not to be hurt—could be finished and done away with—with one good loud blow after another—Jinny could be taught that. I looked at Dugan down there. And his blue eyes remained unharmed. Just as sometimes bubbles a child blows seem the most impervious things, and grass blades will go through them and they still reflect the world, give it back unbroken. Dugan I declare was dead.
“Now watch.”
Dugan said that. He spoke with no pain. Of course he never felt pain, never had time to. But that absurd, boyish tone of competition was in his voice. It had always been a mystery, now it was a deceit. Dugan—born nothing. Dugan—the other boy at the dance, the other man in the bank, the other sweetheart in Sabina, Jinny’s other man—it was together he and I made up the choice. Even then it was hard to believe—we were the choice in everything. But if that was over, settled—how could it open again, the destroyed mouth of Dugan? And I heard him say “Now watch.” He was dead on the ruined grass. But he had risen up. Just then he gave one of the fat little Williams girls a spank. I could see it and not hear it, the most familiar sound in the world.
There was that breathless stillness, and the sky changing the way a hand would pass over it. And I should have called it out then—All is disgrace! Human beings’ cries would swell in the last of evening like this and cross the grass in the yard before the light changes, if only they cried. Our grass in August is like the floor under the sea, and we walk on it slowly playing, and the sky turns green before dark. We don’t say anything the others remember.
But at our feet the shadows faded out light into the pale twilight and the locusts sang in long waves, O-E, O-E. Sweat ran down my back, arms, and legs, branching like some upside-down tree.
Then, “You’ll all come in!” They were calling from the porch—the well-known yellow lamps suddenly all went on. They called us in their shrill women’s voices, Jinny and all and her mama. “Fools, you’re playing in the dark! Come to supper!”
Somebody bumped into me in the sudden blindness of the yard. We laughed at their voracious voices. Across the dark the porch of women waited. It was like a long boat to me, or a box lighted up from within. But I was hungry.
I’d go down to Mrs. Judge O’Leary’s to sleep in my little western room—that’s the house where Mrs. Judge and the three other Sabina schoolteachers sit on the porch. Each evening to avoid them I ran through porch and hall both, like a man through the pouring rain. In the big dark backyard, full of pecan trees, moonlit, Bella opened her eyes and looked at me. They showed the moon. If she drank water, she vomited it up—yet she went with effort to her pan and drank again. I held her. Poor Bella. I thought she suffered from a tumor, and stayed with her most of the night.
Mother said, Son, I noticed that old pistol of your father’s in your nice coat pocket, what do you want with that old thing, your father never cared for it. Not any robbers coming to the bank that I know of. Son, if you’d just saved your money you could take yourself a little trip to the coast. I’d go with you. They always have a breeze at Gulfport, nearly always.
When you get to Jinny’s, there are yuccas and bare ground—it looks like some old playground, with the house back out of sight. Just the sharp, over-grown yuccas with up and down them rays of spiderwebs glinting in the light—as if they wore dresses. And back up in the shade is a little stone statue, all pockmarked now, of a dancing girl with a finger to her chin. Jinny stole that from a Vicksburg park once and her mama let her keep it.
Maideen said, “Are you taking me in yonder? I wish you wouldn’t.”
I looked down and saw my hand on the gate, and said “Wait. I’ve lost a button.” I showed my loose sleeve to Maideen. I felt all at once solemn—fateful—ready to shed tears.
“Why, I’ll sew you one on, if you stop by my house,” Maideen said. She touched my sleeve for an instant. A chameleon ran up a leaf, and held there panting. “Then Mama can see you. She’d be so glad to have you stay to supper.”
I opened the little old gate. I caught a whiff of the sour pears on the ground, the smell of August. I had not told Maideen I was ever coming to supper at any time, or seeing her mama.
“Oh, Jinny can sew it on now,” I said.
“Oh, I can?” Jinny said. She had of course been listening to me all the time from the half-hidden path. She looked out from under her shade-hat. She has the face, she has the threatening stare of a prankster—about to curtsey to you. Don’t you think it’s the look of a woman that loves dogs and horses best, and long trips away she never takes? “Come in before I forget, then,” Jinny said.
We went ahead of Maideen. There in the flower beds walked the same robins, where the sprinkler had been. Once again, we went in the house by the back door. We took hands. We stepped on Tellie’s patch of mint—the yellow cat went around the corner—the back door knob was as hot as the hand to the touch, and on the step, impeding the feet of two people going in together, the fruit jars with the laborious cuttings rooting in water—“Watch out for Mama’s—!” That had happened a thousand times, the way we went in. As a thousand bees droned and burrowed in the pears that lay on the ground.
As Mama Stark almost ran over me, she shrank with a cry, and started abruptly up the stairs—bosom lifted—her shadow trotted up beside her like a nosy bear. But she could never get to the top without turning. She came down again and held up a finger at me. Her voice . . . Randall. Let me tell you about a hand I held yesterday. My partner was Amanda Mackey and you know she always plays her own hand with no more regard for her partner than you have. Well, she opened with a spade and Fanny doubled. I held: a singleton spade five clubs to the king queen five hearts to the king and two little diamonds. I said two clubs, Gert Gish two diamonds, Amanda two spades, all passed. And when I laid down my hand Amanda said, O partner! Why didn’t you bid your hearts! I said Hardly. At the level of three with the opponents doubling for a takeout. It developed of course she was two suited—six spades to the ace jack and four hearts to the ace jack ten, also my ace of clubs. Now Randall. It would have been just as easy for Amanda when she opened her mouth a second time to bid three hearts. But no! She could see only her own hand and so she took us down two, and we could have made five hearts. Now do you think I should have bid three hearts?—I said, You were justified not to, Mama Stark, and she gave me a nod. Then she glared as if I had slapped her. How well she could turn up her discontent to outrage again, and go on upstairs.
We turned, Jinny leading me, into the little back study, “Mama�
�s office,” with the landscape wall-paper and the desk full-up with its immediacy of Daughters of the Confederacy correspondence. Tellie sashayed in with the work basket and then just waited, eyeing and placing us and eyeing the placing herself between us.
“Put it down, Tellie. Now you go on. Pull your mouth in, you hear me?” Jinny took the fancy little basket and flicked it open and fished in it. She found a button that belonged to me, and glanced up at Tellie.
“I hear you’s a mess.” Tellie went out.
Jinny looked at me. She pulled my hand up and I shot. I fired point blank at Jinny—more than once. It was close range—between us suddenly there was barely room for the pistol to come up. And she only stood threading the needle, her hand not deviating, not even shaken at the noise. The little heart-shaped gold and china clock on the mantel was striking—the pistol’s noise had not drowned that. I looked at Jinny and I saw her childish breasts, little pouting excuses for breasts, all sprung with bright holes where my bullets had gone. But Jinny did not feel it, the noise had veered off at the silly clock, and she threaded the needle. She made her little face of success. Her thread always went in its tiny hole.
“Hold still,” Jinny muttered softly between fixed lips. She far from acknowledged her pain—anything but sorrow and pain. Just as when she was angry, she sang some faraway song. For domestic talk her voice would lower to a pitch of utter disparagement. Disparagement that had all my life elated me. The little cheat. I waited unable to move again while she sewed dartingly at my sleeve; the sleeve to my helpless hand. As if I counted my breaths now I slowly exhaled fury and inhaled simple dismay that she was not dead on earth. She bit the thread. I was unsteady when her mouth withdrew. The cheat.
I could not, dared not say goodby to Jinny any more, and “Go get in the croquet,” she told me. She walked to the mirror in the hall, and began cutting at her hair.
I know Vera Lassiter darted in the room and her face lighted. “Mercy me,” she said, and in her mischief came up and fingered Jinny’s hair, the short soft curls. “Who’re you being now? Somebody’s little brother?”
But Jinny stood there at her mirrored face half smiling, so touchingly desirable, so sweet, so tender, vulnerable, touching to me I could hardly bear it, again I could not.
Old Tellie spat into the stove and clanged down an iron lid as I went out through the kitchen. She had spent so much time, twenty-seven years, saying she had brought Jinny into this world: “Born in dis hand.”
“No use for you atall you don’t whup her. Been de matter wid you? Where you been?”
I found Maideen waiting out in the swing, and took her arm and led her down to the croquet where we all played Jinny’s game.
Dear God wipe it clean. Wipe it clean, wipe it out. Don’t let it be.
At last Mrs. Judge O’Leary caught hold of me in the hall. Do me a favor. Ran, do me a favor and put Bella out of her misery. None of these school teachers any better at it than I would be. And Judge too tenderhearted. You do it. Just do it and don’t tell us, hear?
Where have you been, son?—Nowhere, mother, nowhere.—If you were back under my roof I would have things just the way they were. Son, I wish you would just speak to me, and promise—
And I was getting tired, oh so tired, of Mr. Killigrew. I felt cornered when Maideen spoke, kindly as ever, about the workings of the ice house. Now I knew her mother’s maiden name. God help me, the name Parsons was laid on my head like the top teetering crown of a pile of things to remember. Not to forget, the name of Parsons.
I remember your wedding, Old Lady Hartford said at my window, poking her finger through the bars. Never knew it would turn out like this, the prettiest wedding in my memory. If you had all this money, you could leave town.
Maideen believed so openly—I believe she told Miss Callie—that I wanted to take her somewhere sometime by herself and have a nice time—like other people—but that I put it off till I was free. Still, she had eyes to see, we would run into Jinny every time, Jinny and Lonnie Dugan and the crowd. Of course I couldn’t help that, not in Sabina. And then always having to take the little Williams girl home at night. She was the bridge player; that was a game Maideen had never learned to play. Maideen—I never kissed her.
But the Sunday came when I took her over to Vicksburg.
Already on the road I began to miss my bridge. We could get our old game now, Jinny, Dugan, myself and often the little Williams child, who was really a remarkable player, for a Williams. Mama Stark of course would insist on walking out in stately displeasure, we were all very forward children indeed if we thought she would be our fourth, holding no brief for what a single one of us had done. So the game was actually a better one.
Maideen never interrupted our silence with a word. She turned the pages of a magazine. Now and then she lifted her eyes to me, but I could not let her see that I saw her wondering. I would win every night and take their money. Then at home I would be sick, going outdoors so the teachers would not wonder. “Now you really must get little Maideen home. Her mother will be thinking something awful’s happened to her. Won’t she, Maideen?”—Jinny’s voice. “I’ll ride with you”—the little Williams. Maideen would not have begun to cry in Jinny’s house for anything. I could trust her. Did she want to? She wasn’t dumb.
She would get stupefied for sleep. She would lean farther and farther over in her chair. She would never have a rum and coke with us, but she would be simply dead for sleep. She slept sitting up in the car going home, where her mama, now large-eyed, maiden name Parsons, sat up listening. I would wake her up to say I had got her home at last. The little Williams girl would be chatting away in the back seat, there and back wide awake as an owl.
Vicksburg: nineteen miles over the gravel and the thirteen little swamp bridges and the Big Black. Suddenly all sensation returned.
Sabina I had looked at till I saw nothing. Till the street was a pencil mark on the sky, a little stick. Maybe outside my eyes a real roofline clamped down still, Main Street was there the same, four red-brick scallops, branchy trees, one little cross, but if I saw it, it was not with love, it was a pencil mark on the sky. Sabina wasn’t there to me. If some indelible red false-fronts joined one to the other like a little toy train went by—I did not think of my childhood any more. Sabina had held in my soul to constriction. It was never to be its little street again.
I stopped my car at the foot of Vicksburg, under the wall, by the canal. There was a dazzling light, a water-marked light. I woke Maideen and asked her if she were thirsty. She smoothed her dress and lifted her head at the sounds of a city, the traffic on cobblestones just behind the wall. I watched the water-taxi come, chopping over the canal strip at us, absurd as a rocking horse.
“Duck your head,” I said to Maideen.
“In here?”
Very near across the water the island rose glittering against the sunset—a waste of willow trees, yellow and green strands that seemed to weave loosely one upon the other, like a basket that let the light spill out uncontrollably. We shaded our eyes to ride across the water. We all stood up bending our heads under the low top. The Negro who ran the put-put never spoke once, “Get in” or “Get out.” “Where are we going?” Maideen said. In two minutes we were touching the barge. Old ramshackle floating saloon fifty years old, with its twin joined to it, for colored.
Nobody was inside but the one man—a silent, relegated place like a barn. I let him bring some rum cokes out to the only table, the card table out on the back where the two cane chairs were. The sun was going down on the island side, and making Vicksburg alight on the other. East and West were in our eyes.
“Don’t make me drink it. I don’t want to drink it,” Maideen said.
“Go on and drink it.”
“You drink if you like it. Don’t make me drink it.”
“You drink it too.”
I looked at her take some of it, and sit shading her eyes. There were wasps dipping from the ledge over the old screen door and skimming h
er hair. There was a smell of fish and of the floating roots fringing the island. The card table smelled warmly of its oilcloth top and of endless deals. A load of Negroes came over on the water-taxi and stepped out with tin buckets. They were sulphur yellow all over, thickly coated with cottonseed meal, and disappeared in the colored barge at the other end, in single file, as if they were sentenced to it.