The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  She got up from the chair—Billy had taken the mower himself now and was cutting a swath away from Brunker, who hadn’t moved save to shove his hands in his pockets—and crossed through the dining room to the kitchen. She rarely came into the kitchen anymore—there was no need to really, and when she did she felt almost as if she were intruding. Especially when both the Carletons were there. It was nothing they said or did particularly, but they seemed to tense when she entered the room, which was only natural, she supposed. Though Mrs. Swenson never seemed to mind. She wouldn’t have cared if Mamah had camped out under the sink—would have preferred it, for that matter, so she’d have someone to complain to all day long in her high ratcheting whine. But the Carletons were different and she respected that.

  It wasn’t till she was there, her hand on the doorknob, that she sensed something wasn’t right. A noise alerted her, a sharp wet sound, as of meat pounded with a mallet, succeeded by a curse—a man’s voice, Carleton’s, rising up the scale. She pushed open the door. And entered a room that was like an oven, like a furnace, the windows drawn shut and smoke in the air, something burning in a pan on the stove. She saw Carleton then, his back to her, standing over what looked to be a pile of washing on the floor, but wasn’t washing at all. It was Gertrude. Her left eye was swollen shut and there was a bright finger of blood at the corner of her mouth. She crouched in the corner, shrinking away from him, her head bowed, her arms clutched to her chest.

  “You stupid fucking cow!” Carleton shouted. “I’ve told you a thousand times if I’ve told you once: I want my meat cooked rare. Rare, do you hear me? ”

  The door was ajar. The smoke erupted from the pan. Carleton didn’t seem to notice. Or care. He was secure. He’d pulled the windows shut on the scene, closed the room off so he could assault his wife and no one to interfere. Mamah stood there in the doorway, paralyzed.

  Carleton’s shoulders jumped beneath the fabric of his shirt. He dropped his voice. “You stupid, stupid Bajan slut,” he whispered, and lashed out with the toe of his tarnished tan boot, once, twice, as if he were trying to kick through the wall, and Gertrude drew in two sharp breaths in succession and he kicked her again. “What does it take to get some respect around here? Huh? What do I have to do, kill you? Is that what you want? Is it, woman? Is it?”

  That was when Mamah stepped in. She was terrified, panicked, her every instinct to turn and run, but she took hold of the enameled edge of the wash basin and flung herself between them, raising it up like a shield. He was right there, right in her face, the smell of him as raw and unrelieved as anything she’d ever experienced, as death, as mangled flesh, rotten flesh, flesh set afire and burning up in the pan. He didn’t move, didn’t flinch or back off or acknowledge her, and for the fraction of a moment she thought he was going to come at her next, but then she saw that he was as shocked as she was, his eyes retreating from the scene as if he’d just awakened from a dream to this nightmare of abuse and outraged whiteness and the flame under the pan and the smoke rising, rising. “Don’t you dare,” she said.

  He took a step back, dropped his arms to his sides.

  Mamah could barely control her voice. She was shaking. “You get out of here!” she shouted. “Get out!”

  And then the strangest thing happened: he grinned at her. His eyes went cold and up came that automatic grin. But he wasn’t moving. And his hands were clenched. “You speak to me like that?” he said, without a trace of emotion. “Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but a—”

  “No,” Gertrude groaned, trying to get to her feet. “Julian, no—”

  “Nothing but—” And then, only then, did he turn away, jerking the handle of the cast-iron pan so that it skittered away from the flame and clattered to the floor, pausing only to give it a savage kick before he made his way to the door. But he wasn’t finished, not yet. He swung back round on her. “You people,” he spat, “with your books. This woman is my wife here. My wife. Can you understand that?”

  “I’m giving you your notice, right here and now, as of this minute,” she said, but the words sounded hollow in her ears, and she knew it and so did he.

  He shook his head slowly, as if the motion of it pained him—“And you call us niggers,” he said—and then he was gone.

  CHAPTER 7: POP-POP

  He was lost and he knew it, hot blood beating in his temples with the certain knowledge of every degraded inconsolable thing to come, the hurt, the yellow-haired train, Chicago, the island, back to the island with his tail between his legs like a whipped cur, and who was to blame? Who else? Gertrude. That bitch. That cow. And how he’d ever got mixed up with a woman like that was a mystery to him—the ignorance of her and the insipidity, the barefooted low peasant drivel that came out of her mouth—but it was his fault too, he knew that, the fault of his lust that was like a dog’s lust. He saw her naked breasts in the eye of his mind, and the tight sweet insuck of her belly, the place between her legs, the way she swayed beneath the maubey pot perched up on the flat crown of her head sashaying her derriere through the marketplace in Bridgetown, and it was Maubey, maubey for sale, and you t’ink you be wantin’ somet’in’ else, little sir?, she seventeen and he too weak to deny himself. That’s right. And now it was over. Now it was ruined. One slip and he had his notice and where would he go now? Women. They squeezed you, oh, they did. Squeezed you. Squeezed you. Till there was no juice left.

  Only then did he realize that he was talking to himself, that he’d spoken aloud for anybody to hear, and he took a moment to lean forward and spit on the corner of the rug he’d brushed himself and brushed again till the nap stood up and laid itself down twice over. But the door. The door was right there beside him, still half-open, because he’d stalked out of that room and stopped in his traces, his back pressed to the wall, too worked up and twisted with the sick clutch of despair to make his legs work. Through the gap of the door came the smoke, black as skin, twisted like a pot of eels, eelskin, rising in a column to fan across the ceiling. He could hear her in there sobbing as if she had something to sob about—he had half a mind to go back through that door and finish what he’d started, finish both of them, both of the bitches, one black and one white. Mamah. Mamah Bouton Borthwick. Translator. Suffragist. Soul mate. He’d read in that book and it was nothing but cant and heresy. Who was she to interfere between a man and his wife? She might have been free with her love but even the whores on Baxter Road had the sense to charge for it.

  His legs were moving. He was going up the hall, that was what he was doing, thinking to get into the cornfield and work the rage down out of his head and into his legs, his feet, down into the ground where he could bury it, and he was twisting his hands, one inside the clench of the other—the heel of his right hand stinging where he’d slapped her, or had he burned it when he jerked the pan from the stove? No matter. He could barely control the right one or the left either, all the fine things of the house mocking him with what they were and he wasn’t, but he fought them with all his will and then he was out the door and freed into the air he could breathe with its veritable stink of cattle and their hindquarters, the sun sudden on his face, and a flutter of movement against the sky. He saw the peacocks perched on the low line of the roof like displaced things and that was all right because they were cocks and not hens and the hens were little pecking creatures going around in the shadows because they were ashamed of themselves.

  Things had been coming to a boil for the past week and more, these whites—Brodelle and the dishwater man and the rest of them, the fat-faced fools in the village, shopkeepers, horsetraders, farmers in their buggies and black Ford automobiles—giving him no more notice than they would a bug. Or less.173 At least they could see a bug, but they didn’t see him at all because they didn’t like what they saw any more than he did. Unless they wanted something. Then it was Carleton, fetch me this; Carleton, polish my boots; Carleton, the soup’s cold. And Gertrude. Gertrude gave him her look of dole day and night, fretting over him, be
gging him not to upset the mistress—or the children or the precious holy houseguests or the squinting idiot at the grocery, as if every one of them was a king and queen in his own right—and always it was the same low peasant talk. Biddy wisdom and platitudes. Diarrhea out the wrong end.

  She’d got up that morning in the pulsing gray tumble of dawn and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Julian, Julian, I dream de sucking pig.” He ignored her. He was slapping water on his face, feeling his way with the razor because he wouldn’t look in the mirror. “Not jus’ de pig.” She came round him from behind, thrust her sorrowful face in his. Her voice had turned ominous—more of her Bajan claptrap and superstition, that was what it was, more ignorance. Tears started up in her eyes. “I dreamin’ de wedding too, don’t you see? Pork. Pork and de wedding all in one dream—”

  “Oh, hush it,” he snapped and turned his back on her again, the towel rough as sandpaper against his face. “There isn’t going to be any wedding. Not here, not with these people. They’re too good for the forms and rituals of civilization. For the Bible. For anything but themselves.”

  Her eyes bled out at him. She turned up her palms and she was pleading now, her voice slipped down and gone, no more than a gargle in her throat. “Don’t you know what that means?”

  He knew. If you dreamed of pork and a wedding, all in one dream, it meant the cataclysm was coming, pop-pop, the bloodletting, the horror. And maybe it was, but he didn’t want to hear about it. Not now. Not at this hour of the morning, when he had to put on his service jacket and go in amongst the white people and bow and scrape like a plantation nigger, not ever. “Shut that ignorance,” he said, whirling round on her.

  She shrank away from him, dwindling into her bones, but she was still there. Still talking. Still pushing him. She said: “What you do wid dat hatchet? ”

  “Hatchet? What hatchet? I don’t know anything about any hatchet.”

  “Under de pillow. For de shingle. Dat one.”

  He shrugged, caught out in a lie, and what was she now, his keeper? “I don’t care,” he said, and he was just floating the words out there. “Protection. I keep it for protection.”

  “From what? Bears?” Her eyes had sharpened. She was on the offensive and he didn’t like it one whit. “De redskin Indian wid dere tomahawk? T’ieves? Or maybe Jesus. Maybe Jesus gone come for you and you gone chop ’im up in little pieces.” She backed up a step, just out of reach, in her shift still, with her eyes like two coals shining in the stove, two red-hot fiery coals that nothing in this world could extinguish. “Julian,” she whispered. “Julian.”

  “What? What is it? Can’t you see I’ve got work to do—?”

  “I heard you. Las’ night. Night before dat too. You was sittin’ by the window dere, talkin’ to dat hatchet you was holdin’ in your lap like a baby child, like a hex doll. Dat what it is—dat your hex doll?”

  There was no answering that kind of willful stupidity and she knew it before the words were out of her mouth because he’d taught her to know it and he was going to keep on teaching her till she learned it for good and he took two quick steps forward and caught her face in his right hand, pinching it there in the hollows of her jawbone so her mouth was distorted, and then he shoved that lewd hateful cringing black fish face as hard as he could so she fell away from him like one of her rag-and-bone voodoo poppets and that put him in a mood, it surely did.

  But here he was in the courtyard, striding along with his head down and the peacocks wailing and the sun beating at him like a hammer, as full of pure rage as he’d ever been. One foot in front of the other, the cornfield down there like a tall green stand of cane, the closest thing to cane, and maybe she’d relent, maybe she’d step back and keep him on if he could just get down there into that field and let it all run out of him like the poison from a snakebit wound till his heart slowed and the beating stopped in his head. He was so intent he didn’t see the figure poised there in the shadows of the stable till the figure emerged into the chop of the light in one swift motion—a giant’s step—and took hold of his arm.

  Brodelle. Brodelle in jodhpurs and riding boots, narrowing his wet blue eyes and pursing his lips round whatever it was he had to say, and what was it going to be this time? Lick my boots, kiss my arse, go fuck yourself? But no. “Saddle my horse, will you?” That was what it was. Saddle my horse. “I’m in a hurry.”

  He didn’t have time to be astonished, the sequence of events as swift and sure and unstoppable as a row of dominoes all falling in a line, and he jerked his arm back as if he’d been stung, squared his shoulders under that sun and stared the man in the face, the fool, the interfering white fool who couldn’t have known what he was doing. He stared. Just stared. And here came the change, because Brodelle saw him now, really saw him, one man to another, the tight-jawed look of the deliverer of commands shading to something else, something puerile and powerless, because a command presupposes a response—scrape and bow, Yassuh, Massah—and Julian was giving him nothing. “What’s the matter with you—are you deaf? I said saddle the goddamn horse.”

  One more full beat, holding fast to those soft sinking useless wet eyes and not a word needed, not a word to waste, and then he turned his back on him and went down the courtyard to where the green corn sprang up even as Brodelle cursed him—“You black nigger son of a bitch!”—knowing even then that there was no help now, not in the fields or anywhere else, because there were two voices speaking in his head, the one that said maybe, maybe I will, maybe she will, maybe, and the one that said never, never again, never, never, never.

  She wasn’t much use as a nurse—she didn’t have the sympathy for it or the patience either and the sight of blood made her feel faint—but she bent to Gertrude, helped her to her feet and threw a frantic glance round the kitchen, looking for a scrap of cloth, a towel, anything to use as a compress. The pan was on the floor, a blackened slab of meat hissing beside it, the smoke faltering now, bellying and receding till it began to dissolve in transparent wisps. She went to the sink, ran cold water over the washrag she found hanging on a hook there and tried to press it to Gertrude’s eye, but Gertrude shied away. Wouldn’t look at her. “No, no, ma’am,” she kept saying. “No, no, don’t you bother. I jus’ fine. Julian too. Julian fine. Please, ma’am, please don’t go blamin’ Julian, ’cause half de time he don’t know what he do.”

  “Doesn’t know?” She was outraged. How could this woman even begin to defend her husband when she herself had seen him kick her as remorselessly as he might have kicked an animal? “He beat you.”

  “No, I slip on de wet spot and take a tumble, dass all.” The eyes came up now in a sidelong glance. Her hair had fallen loose in a solid kinked wedge that floated over one eyebrow in a glisten of the purest black. She had a blunted look to her, the look of suffering in all its forms and array, but there was something else there too, something distant and calculating.

  It took a moment before Mamah realized it wasn’t fear of her husband that was driving her—this pretty young girl who only meant well—but fear of her, of the white woman who’d invaded the kitchen, the mistress of the house who could snap her fingers and hire and fire three times over. It was a shock. She’d seen women cowed by their husbands, living behind them, through them, as if they were mere instruments or tools, but this was sadder still, the saddest thing in the world. “You know I have to let you go,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Give ’im one more chance. He de good mon. You say so youself.”

  But she was shaking her head, awash with emotion, soaked in it, trembling still with the dregs of the fear and rage that had thrown her up against that hateful black beast who’d beaten his wife as if she weren’t even human and was one step from turning on her too. It was impossible, intolerable to have that sort of thing in her own house as if they were in some foreign slum, some shanty crawling with every kind of violence and ignorance and fever. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I know it’s not your fault—you’re a good
woman, I’m sure of it, a good dutiful young woman and a first-rate cook . . . but don’t you see? It’s just wrong. Wrong.”

  She realized then that she still had the wet compress in her hand and she held it out before her with an insistent shake of her wrist till Gertrude stepped forward and took it. Then she went to the door, thinking of Frank because Frank would know what to do, Frank would handle this, and she didn’t care how hectic his work was or how much they needed him because he’d have to come home that very afternoon, on the next train, and she wouldn’t feel safe till he did. She’d get her bag and go right straight out the door and have Billy drive her to the telegraph office, that was what she was thinking, but she paused just a moment in the doorway to look back at Gertrude standing stock-still amidst the wreckage with the dripping rag clenched in one hand while she absently lifted the other to her lip and the dark stain of blood there. “You’ve got two weeks,” she said. And once more, one final time: “I’m sorry.”

  Her first impulse was to go to the drafting room and rouse Brodelle or Herbert Fritz to go find Billy and she’d actually started off in that direction before she reversed herself and went instead to the bedroom for her purse and hat. She barely glanced at herself in the mirror—she was wrought up, her heart in her mouth, and there was no time to waste—and then she was striding through the house, past the kitchen, out the door to the loggia and into the drafting room. Herbert was there, bent over his desk, but Brodelle was nowhere to be seen.

  “Herbert, I don’t mean to interrupt,” she said, and she could hear the agitation in her own voice, “but I was wondering if you’ve seen Billy—or, I mean, if you could go and fetch him, please. I’ve got to—it’s urgent.”