White People

by Allan Gurganus

  “Why is it we’re cousins and both poor?” I asked her. “Why could it not be just a little different so things’d fall into place for us more, why, Emily?” And she lifted one shoulder and turned her head aside. She half-fell into the sweet bushes then, white and green and purple, but caught herself and looked away from me. Em finally spoke but I half-heard with all the Roman candles going off and Wilkie bawling. She said quiet, looking out toward water through the beautiful branches, “We will always know, Frank, you and me will. Hearing as how you understand it, that already gives me so much, Frank. Oh, if you but guessed how it strengthens me just to say your name at night, Frank, Franklin Horatio Irwin, Jr., how I love to say it out, sir.” Lavinia was calling that same name but different and I turned, fearful of being caught here by her, me unfaithful to the one that loved me if not strongest then loudest, public-like. “Excuse me, Cousin Emily,” said I, and walked off and then soon after got mustered in, then snagged the minie that costs the leg then the rest of it, me, and no one knowing my real heart. Mother? I never even kissed her. Momma? Treat her right. Accord my cousin Emily such tender respects as befit the young widow of a man my age, for she is that to me, and not Lavinia that made such a show at the funeral and is ordering more styles of black crepe from a Boston catalogue even now, Momma. Have Emily to dinner often as you can afford it, and encourage her to look around at other boys, for there’s not much sense in wasting two lives, mine and hers, for my own cowardly mistakes. That is one thing needs saying out.

  I used to speak to my bearded visitor about brother Wilkie and all of you and I thought up things I’d tell my kid brother who has so bad a temper but is funny throughout. I’d want Wilkie to be brave and not do what the town said he should, like pay court on a girl who’s snooty and bossy just because of who her kin is and their grand home. I would tell Wilkie to hide in a cave and not sign up like I did, with the bands and drums and the setting off of all fireworks not burned up in the Claxtons’ calamity rowboat—but, boy, it sure did look pretty going down, didn’t it, Momma? My doctor took some time and pains with me and, near the end, got like Lavinia in telling me how fine a looking young man I was. That never pleased me much since I didn’t see it all that clear myself and had not personally earned it and so felt a little guilty on account, not that any of it matters now. The Lady from Baltimore combed my hair and said nice things and I am sorry that she never got the watch and the daguerrotypes to you. She is a confidence artist who makes tours of hospitals, promising to take boys’ valuables home but never does and sells them in the shops. Still, at the time, I trusted her, her voice was so refined and hands real soft and brisk and I felt good for days after she left, believing Wilkie’d soon have Poppa’s gold watch in hand, knowing it had been with me at the end.

  Just before they shot me, Momma, I felt scared to where I considered, for one second, running. No one ever knew of this but I must tell you now because just thinking on my failing cost me many inward tribulations at the last. “I could jump out of this hole and run into that woods and hide and then take off forever.” So the dreadful plan rushed forth, and then how I stifled it, choked practically. I never in my life was thought capable of even thinking such a thing, and here I’d said it to myself! Then, like as punishment, not six minutes after looking toward that peaceful-seeming woods, I moved to help another fellow from Bucks County (Ephraim’s second cousin, the youngest Otis boy from out New Hope way) and felt what first seemed a earthquake that’d knocked the entire battle cockeyed but that narrowed to a nearby complaint known just as the remains of my left leg. It felt numb till twenty minutes later when I seriously noticed. It takes that kind of time sometimes to feel. It takes a delay between the ending and knowing what to say of that, which is why this reaches you six weeks after my kind male nurse’s news, ma’am. I asked him once why he’d quit the newspaper business to come visit us, the gimps and bullet-catchers, us lost causes.

  He leaned nearer and admitted a secret amusement: said he was, from among the thousands of Northern boys and Reb prisoners he’d seen, recasting Heaven. Infantry angels, curly-headed all. “And Frank,” said he, “I don’t like to tease you with the suspense but it’s between you and two other fellows, a three-way heat for the Archangel Gabriel.” I laughed, saying as how the others had my blessings for that job just yet. He kept close by me during the amputation part especially. They said that if the leg was taken away, then so would all my troubles go. And I trusted them, Momma. And everybody explained and was real courteous and made the person feel manly like the loss of the leg could be his choice and would I agree? “Yes,” I said.

  My doctor’s name was Dr. Bliss and during the cutting of my leg, others kept busting into the tent, asking him stuff and telling him things and all calling him by name, Bliss, Bliss, Bliss, they said. It helped me to have that name and word drifting over the table where they worked on me so serious, and I thanked God neither you nor Emily would be walking in to see me spread out like that, so bare and held down helpless, like some boy. Afterwards, my friend the nurse trained me to pull the covers back, he taught me I must learn to look at it now. But I couldn’t bear to yet. They’d tried but I had wept when asked to stare below at the lonely left knee. It’d been “left” all right! Walt (my nurse’s name was Walt) he said we would do it together. He held my hand and counted then—one, two, three … I did so with him and it was like looking at what was there and what was not at once, just as my lost voice is finding you during this real dawn, ma’am. He told me to cheer up, that it could’ve been my right leg and only later did I see he meant that as a little joke and I worried I had let him down by not catching on in time. I have had bad thoughts, lustful thoughts and evil. I fear I am yet a vain person and always have been secretly, Momma. You see, I fretted how it’d be to live at home and go downtown on crutches and I knew Lavinia’s plan would change with me a cripple. Lavinia would not like that. And even after everything, I didn’t know if I could choose Emily, a seamstress after all, over so grand a place on Summit Avenue as the Mayor’d already promised Lavinia and me (it was the old Congers mansion, Momma).

  It seems to me from here that your Frank has cared way too much for how others saw him. It was Poppa’s dying early that made me want to do so much and seem so grown and that made me join up when you had your doubts, I know. You were ever strict with me but I really would’ve turned out all right in the end … if it hadn’t been for this.

  Momma, by late April, I could feel the bad stuff moving up from the leg’s remains, like some type of chemical, a kind of night or little army set loose in me and taking all the early lights out, one by one, lamp by lamp, farm by farm, house by house it seemed. The light in my head, don’t laugh, was the good crystal lantern at your oilclothed kitchen table. That was the final light I worried for—and knew, when that went, it all went. But, through chills and talking foolish sometimes, I tried keeping that one going, tried keeping good parts separate, saved back whole. I felt like if I could but let you hear me one more time, it’d ease you some. Your sleeping so poorly since … that’s just not like you, Ma, and grieves me here. Dying at my age is an embarrassment, on top of everything else! It was just one shot in the knee, but how could I have stopped it when it started coming up the body toward the last light in the kitchen in the head? You told me not to enlist—you said, as our household’s one breadwinner, I could stay home. But the braided uniform and the party that Lavinia promised tipped me over. Fevered, I imagined talking to Wilkie and all the younger cousins lined up on our front porch’s seven steps, and me wagging my finger and striding to and fro in boots like our Lt.’s beautiful English leather boots, such as I never owned in life. I talked bold and I talked grand and imagined Emily was in the shady house with you, and beside you, listening, approving my sudden wisdom that’d come on me with the suffering, and on account of the intestine cramps, and after the worst convulsion Walt got me through, still that lead was coming up the thigh into my stomach then greeting and seizing the chest and t
hen more in the throat and that was about all of it except for the great gray beard and those knowing eyes that seemed to say Yes Yes, Frank, even to my need to be done with it, the pain (the last white pain of it, I do not mind telling you, was truly something, Momma). I couldn’t have held out much longer anyway, and the idea of choosing between my two loves, plus living on a crutch for life, it didn’t set right with vain me.

  This I am telling you should include that I hid the five-dollar gold piece I won for the History Prize at the Academy commencement up inside the hollowed left head-post of my bedstead. Get Wilkie to go upstairs with you and help lift the whole thing off the floor and out the coin will fall. Use it for you and Emily’s clothes. Bonnets might be nice with it. Buy nothing but what’s extra, that is how I want it spent. I should’ve put it in your hand before I left, but I planned to purchase my getting-home gifts out of that, and never thought I wouldn’t. Selfish, keeping it squirreled back and without even guessing. But then maybe all people are vain. Maybe it’s not just your Frank, right?

  If you wonder at the color you are seeing now, Momma, the pink-red like our fine conch shell on the parlor’s hearth, you are seeing the backs of your own eyelids, Momma. You will soon hear the Claxtons’ many crowers set up their alarum yet again and will catch a clinking that is McBride’s milk wagon pulled by Bess, who knows each house on old McBride’s route. Your eyes are soon to open on your room’s whitewash and July’s yellow light in the dear place. You will wonder at this letter of a dream, ma’am and, waking, will look toward your bedside table and its often-unfolded letter from the gentleman who told you of my passing. His letter makes this one possible. For this is a letter toward your loving Franklin Horatio Irwin, Jr., not only from him. It is your voice finding ways to smoothe your mind. This is for letting you get on with what you have to tend, Momma. You’ve always known I felt Lavinia to be well-meaning but right silly, and that our sensible and deep Emily was truly meant as mine from her and my’s childhoods onward. You’ve guessed where the coin is stowed, as you did ever know such things, but have held back on account of honoring the privacy even of me dead. Go fetch it later today, and later today spend it on luxuries you could not know otherwise. This is the rich echo that my bearded nurse’s voice allows. It is mostly you. And when the pink-and-red opens, and morning’s here already, take your time in dressing, go easy down the stairs, let Wilkie doze a little longer than he should and build the fire and start a real big breakfast. Maybe even use the last of Poppa’s maple syrup we tapped that last winter he was well. Use it up and then get going on things, new things, hear? That is the wish of your loving eldest son, Frank. That is the wish of the love of your son Frank who is no deader than anything else that ever lived so hard and wanted so so much, Mother.

  Something holy will stand before you soon, ma’am. Cleave to that. Forget me. Forget me by remembering me. Imagine what a boy like me would give now for but one more breakfast (ever my favorite meal—I love how it’s most usually the same) and even Wilkie’s crabiness early, or the Claxtons’ rooster house going off everywhichway like their rowboat did so loud. I know what you know, ma’am, and what you doubt, and so do you: but be at peace in this: Everything you suspect about your missing boy is true. So, honor your dear earned civilian life. Nights, sleep sounder. Be contained. In fifty seconds you will refind waking and the standing light. Right away you’ll feel better, without knowing why or even caring much. You will seem to be filling, brimming with this secret rushing-in of comfort, ma’am. Maybe like some bucket accustomed to a mean purpose—say, a hospital slop pail—but one suddenly asked to offer wet life to lilacs unexpected here. Or maybe our dented well bucket out back, left daily under burning sun and daily polished by use and sandy winds, a bucket that’s suddenly dropped far beneath even being beneath the ground and finally striking a stream below all usual streams and one so dark and sweet and ice-cream cold, our bucket sinks it is so full, Mother. Your eyes will open and what you’ll bring to light, ma’am, is that fine clear over-sloshing vessel. Pulled back. Pulled back up to light. Be refreshed. Feel how my secrets and your own (I know a few of yours too, ma’am, oh yes I do) are pooling here, all mixed now, cool, and one.

  I am not the ghost of your dead boy. I am mostly you. I am just your love for him, left stranded so unnaturally alive—a common enough miracle. And such fineness as now reaches you in your half-sleep is just the echo of your own best self. Which is very good.

  Don’t give all your credit to your dead. Fineness stays so steady in you, ma’am, and keeps him safe, keeps him lit continually. It’s vain of Frank but he is now asking: could you, and Wilkie and Em, please hold his spot for him for just a little longer? Do…. And Mother? Know I rest. Know that I am in my place here. I feel much easement, Ma, in having heard you say this to yourself.

  There, worst worrying’s done. Here accepting it begins.

  All right. Something holy now stands directly before you. How it startles, waiting so bright at the foot of your iron bedstead. Not to shy away from it. I will count to three and we will open on it, please. Then we’ll go directly in, like, hand-in-hand, we’re plunging. What waits is what’s still yours, ma’am, which is ours.

  —Such brightness, see? It is something very holy.

  Mother? Everything will be in it.

  It is a whole day

  —One two three, and light

  —Now, we move toward it

  —Mother? Wake!

  1989

  * Section I quotes, unchanged and complete, Walt Whitman’s letter titled “Death of a Pennsylvania Soldier” from “Specimen Days”—first published in his Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia, 1892), reprinted in Whitman: The Library of America’s Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (1982).

  Blessed Assurance

  A Moral Tale

  In memory of James Zito

  and for Grace Paley

  I SOLD funeral insurance to North Carolina black people. I myself am not black. Like everybody else who was alive fifty-nine years ago, I was so young then, you know? I still feel bad about what went on. My wife says: telling somebody might help. Here lately, worry over this takes a percentage of my sleep right off the top. —So I’m telling you, okay?

  See, I only did it to put myself through college. I knew it wasn’t right. But my parents worked the swing shift at the cotton mill. We went through everything they earned before they earned it. I grew up in one of those employee row houses. Our place stood near the cotton loading ramp. Our shrubs were always tagged with fluff blown off stacked bales. My room’s window screens looked flannel as my kiddie pajamas. Mornings, the view might show six white windblown hunks, big as cakes. You didn’t understand you’d steadily breathed such fibers—not till, like Dad, you started coughing at age forty and died at fifty-one.—I had to earn everything myself. First I tried peddling the Book of Knowledge. Seemed like a good thing to sell. I attended every single training session. This sharp salesman showed us how to let the “T” volume fall open at the Taj Mahal. Our company had spent a little extra on that full-page picture. In a living room the size of a shipping crate, I stood before my seated parents. I practiced. They nodded. I still remember, “One flick of the finger takes us from ‘Rome’ to … ‘Rockets’!” Before I hiked off with my wares, Mom would pack a bag lunch, then wave from our fuzzy porch, “Jerry? Say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you very much.’ They like that.”

  OTHER SALESKIDS owned cars. I had to walk from house to house lugging my sample kit: twenty-six letters’ worth of knowledge gets heavy pretty fast. My arms and back grew stronger but my spirits sort of caved in. Our sales manager assigned me to the Mill district—he claimed I had inside ties. The only thing worse than facing strangers door-to-door is finding people you know there.