She threw the handkerchief down and held the book too high for him to reach and began to read it, her face after a second a.s.suming an exaggerated comical expression. The others moved around and looked at it over her shoulder. "My G.o.d," somebody said.
One of the men peered at it sharply from behind a thick pair of gla.s.ses. "That"s valuable," he said. "That"s a collector"s item," and he took it away from the rest of them and retired to another chair.
"Don"t let George go off with that," his girl said.
"I tell you it"s valuable," George said. "1832."
Bevel shifted his direction again toward the room where he slept.He shut the door behind him and moved slowly in the darkness to the bed and sat down and took off his shoes and got under the cover. After a minute a shaft of light let in the tall silhouette of his mother. She tiptoed lightly cross the room and sat down on the edge of his bed. "What did that dolt of a preacher say about me?" she whispered. "What lies have you been telling today, honey?"
He shut his eye and heard her voice from a long way away, as if he were under the river and she on top of it. She shook his shoulder."Harry," she said, leaning down and putting her mouth to his ear, "tell me what he said." She pulled him into a sitting position and he felt as if he had been drawn up from under the river. "Tell me," she whispered and her bitter breath covered his face.
He saw the pale oval close to him in the dark. "He said I"m not the same now," he muttered. "I count."
After a second, she lowered him by his shirt front onto the pillow.She hung over him an instant and brushed her lips against his forehead.Then she got up and moved away, swaying her hips lightly through the shaft of light.
He didn"t wake up early but the apartment was still dark and close when he did. For a while he lay there, picking his nose and eyes. Then he sat up in bed and looked out the window. The sun came in palely, stained gray by the gla.s.s. Across the street at the Empire Hotel, a colored cleaning woman was looking down from an upper window, resting her face on her folded arms. He got up and put on his shoes and went to the bathroom and then into the front room. He ate two crackers spread with anchovy paste, that he found on the coffee table, and drank some ginger ale left in a bottle and looked around for his book but it was not there.
The apartment was silent except for the faint humming of the refrigerator. He went into the kitchen and found some raisin bread heels and spread a half jar of peanut b.u.t.ter between them and climbed up on the tall kitchen stool and sat chewing the sandwich slowly, wiping his nose every now and then on his shoulder. When he finished he found some chocolate milk and drank that. He would rather have had the ginger ale he saw but they left the bottle openers where he couldn"t reach them. He studied what was left in the refrigerator for a while-some shriveled vegetables that she had forgot were there and a lot of brown oranges that she bought and didn"t squeeze; there were three or four kinds of cheese and something fishy in a paper bag; the rest was a pork bone. He left the refrigerator door open and wandered back into the dark living room and sat down on the sofa.
He decided they would be out cold until one o"clock and that they would all have to go to a restaurant for lunch. He wasn"t high enough for the table yet and the waiter would bring a highchair and he was too big for a highchair. He sat in the middle of the sofa, kicking it with his heels. Then he got up and wandered around the room, looking into the ashtrays at the b.u.t.ts as if this might be a habit. In his own room he had picture books and blocks but they were for the most part torn up; he found the way to get new ones was to tear up the ones he had. There was very little to do at any time but eat; however, he was not a fat boy.
He decided he would empty a few of the ashtrays on the floor.If he only emptied a few, she would think they had fallen. He emptied two, rubbing the ashes carefully into the rug with his finger. Then he lay on the floor for a while, studying his feet which he held up in the air. His shoes were still damp and he began to think about the river.
Very slowly, his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn"t know he"d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.
He got up and tiptoed into their bedroom and stood in the dim light there, looking for her pocketbook. His glance pa.s.sed her long pale arm hanging off the edge of the bed down to the floor, and across the white mound his father made, and past the crowded bureau, until it rested on the pocketbook hung on the back of a chair.He took a car-token out of it and half a package of Life Savers.Then he left the apartment and caught the car at the corner. He hadn"t taken a suitcase because there was nothing from there he wanted to keep.
He got off the car at the end of the line and started down the road he and Mrs. Connin had taken the day before. He knew there wouldn"t be anybody at her house because the three boys and the girl went to school and Mrs. Conn in had told him she went out to clean. He pa.s.sed her yard and walked on the way they had gone to the river. The paper brick houses were far apart and after a while the dirt place to walk on ended and he had to walk on the edge of the highway. The sun was pale yellow and high and hot.
He pa.s.sed a shack with an orange gas pump in front of it but he didn"t see the old man looking out at nothing in particular from the doorway. Mr. Paradise was having an orange drink. He finished it slowly, squinting over the bottle at the small plaid-coated figure disappearing down the road. Then he set the empty bottle on a bench and, still squinting, wiped his sleeve over his mouth. He went in the shack and picked out a peppermint stick, a foot long and two inches thick, from the candy shelf, and stuck it in his hip pocket. Then he got in his car and drove slowly down the highway after the boy.
By the time Bevel came to the field speckled with purple weeds, he was dusty and sweating and he crossed it at a trot to get into the woods as fast as he could. Once inside, he wandered from tree to tree, trying to find the path they had taken yesterday. Finally he found a line Worn in the pine needles and followed it until he saw the steep trail twisting down through the trees.
Mr. Paradise had left his automobile back some wayan the road and had walked to the place where he was accustomed to sit almost every day, holding an unbaited fishline in the water while he stared at the river pa.s.sing in front of him. Anyone looking at him from a distance would have seen an old boulder half hidden in the bushes.
Bevel didn"t see him at all. He only saw the river, shimmering reddish yellow, and bounded into it with his shoes and his coat on and took a gulp. He swallowed some and spit the rest out and then he stood there in water up to his chest and looked around him. The sky was a clear pale blue, all in one piece-except for the hole the sun made-and fringed around the bottom with treetops. His coat floated to the surface and surrounded him like a strange gay lily pad and he stood grinning in the sun. He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn"t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward.
In a second he began to gasp and sputter and his head reappeared on the surface; he started under again and the same thing happened.The river wouldn"t have him. He tried again and came up, choking.This was the way it had been when the preacher held him under-he had had to fight with something that pushed him back in the face. He stopped and thought suddenly: it"s another joke, it"s just another joke! He thought how far he had come for nothing and he began to hit and splash and kick the filthy river. His feet were already treading on nothing. He gave one low cry of pain and indignation. Then he heard a shout and turned his head and saw something like a giant pig bounding after him, shaking a red and white club and shouting. He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him.
Mr. Paradise"s head appeared from time to time on the surface of the water. Finally, far downstream, the old man rose like some ancient water monster and stood empty-handed, staring with his dull eyes as far down the river line as he could see.
A Circle in the Fire (1954)
SOMETIMES the last line of trees was a solid gray-blue wall a little darker than the sky but this afternoon it was almost black and behind it the sky was a livid glaring white. "You know that woman that had that baby in that iron lung?" Mrs. Pritchard said. She and the child"s mother were underneath the window the child was looking down from. Mrs. Pritchard was leaning against the chimney, her arms folded on a shelf of stomach, one foot crossed and the toe pointed into the ground. She was a large woman with a small pointed face and steady ferreting eyes. Mrs. Cope was the opposite, very small and trim, with a large round face and black eyes that seemed to be enlarging all the time behind her gla.s.ses as if she were continually being astonished. She was squatting down pulling gra.s.s out of the border beds around the house. Both women had on sunhats that had once been identical but now Mrs. Pritchard"s was faded and out of shape while Mrs. Cope"s was still stiff and bright green.
"I read about her," she said.
"She was a Pritchard that married a Brookins and so"s kin to me-about my seventh or eighth cousin by marriage."
"Well, well," Mrs. Cope muttered and threw a large clump of nut gra.s.s behind her. She worked at the weeds and nut gra.s.s as if they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place.
"Beinst she was kin to us, we gone to see the body," Mrs. Pritchard said. "Seen the little baby too."
Mrs. Cope didn"t say anything. She was used to these calamitous stories; she said they wore her to a frazzle. Mrs. Pritchard would go thirty miles for the satisfaction of seeing anybody laid away.Mrs. Cope always changed the subject to something cheerful but the child had observed that this only put Mrs. Pritchard in a bad humor.
The child thought the blank sky looked as if it were pushing against the fortress wall, trying to break through. The trees across the near field were a patchwork of gray and yellow greens. Mrs. Cope was always worrying about fires in her woods. When the nights were very windy, she would say to the child, "Oh Lord, do pray there won"t be any fires, it"s so windy," and the child would grunt from behind her book or not answer at all because she heard it so often. In the evenings in the summer when they sat on the porch, Mrs. Cope would say to the child who was reading fast to catch the last light, "Get up and look at the sunset, it"s gorgeous. You ought to get up and look at it," and the child would scowl and not answer or glare up once across the lawn and two front pastures to the gray-blue sentinel line of trees and then begin to read again with no change of expression, sometimes muttering for meanness, "It looks like a fire. You better get up and smell around and see if the woods ain"t on fire."
"She had her arm around it in the coffin," Mrs. Pritchard went on, but her voice was drowned out by the sound of the tractor that the Negro, Culver, was driving up the road from the barn. The wagon was attached and another Negro was sitting in the back, bouncing, his feet jogging about a foot from the ground. The one on the tractor drove it past the gate that led into the field on the left.
Mrs. Cope turned her head and saw that he had not gone through the gate because he was too lazy to get off and open it. He was going the long way around at her expense. "Tell him to stop and come here!" she shouted.
Mrs. Pritchard heaved herself from the chimney and waved her arm in a fierce circle but he pretended not to hear. She stalked to the edge of the lawn and screamed, "Get off, I toljer! She wants you!"
He got off and started toward the chimney, pushing his head and shoulders forward at each step to give the appearance of hurrying.His head was thrust up to the top in a white cloth hat streaked with different shades of sweat. The brim was down and hid all but the lower parts of his reddish eyes.
Mrs. Cope was on her knees, pointing the trowel into the ground."Why aren"t you going through the gate there?" she asked and waited, her eyes shut and her mouth stretched flat as if she were prepared for any ridiculous answer.
"Got to raise the blade on the mower if we do," he said and his gaze bore just to the left of her. Her Negroes were as destructive and impersonal as the nut gra.s.s.
Her eyes, as she opened them, looked as if they would keep on enlarging until they turned her wrongsideout. "Raise it," she said and pointed across the road with the trowel.
He moved off.
"It"s nothing to them," she said. "They don"t have the responsibility.I thank the Lord all these things don"t come at once. They"d destroy me."
"Yeah, they would," Mrs. Pritchard shouted against the sound of the tractor. He opened the gate and raised the blade and drove through and down into the field; the noise diminished as the wagon disappeared. "I don"t see myself how she had it in in it," she went on in her normal voice. it," she went on in her normal voice.
Mrs. Cope was bent over, digging fiercely at the nut gra.s.s again."We have a lot to be thankful for," she said. "Every day you should say a prayer of thanksgiving. Do you do that?"
"Yes"m," Mrs. Pritchard said. "See she was in ill four months before she even got thataway. Look like to me if I was in one of them, I would leave off... how you reckun they...?"
"Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving," Mrs. Cope said."Think of all we have. Lord." she said and sighed, "we have everything," and she looked around at her rich pastures and hills heavy with timber and shook her head as if it might all he a burden she was trying to shake off her back.
Mrs. Pritchard studied the woods. "All I got is four abscess teeth," she remarked.
"Well, be thankful you don "t have five," Mrs. Cope snapped and threw back a clump of gra.s.s. "We might all be destroyed by a hurricane. I can always find something to be thankful for."
Mrs. Pritchard took up a hoe resting against the side of the house and struck lightly at a weed that had come up between two bricks in the chimney. "I reckon you you can," she said, her voice a little more nasal than usual with contempt. can," she said, her voice a little more nasal than usual with contempt.
"Why, think of all those poor Europeans," Mrs. Cope went on, "that they put in boxcars like cattle and rode them to Siberia. Lord," she said, "we ought to spend half our time on our knees."
"I know if I was in an iron lung there would be some things I wouldn"t do," Mrs. Pritchard said, scratching her bare ankle with the end of the hoe.
"Even that poor woman had plenty to be thankful for," Mrs.Cope said.
"She could be thankful she wasn"t dead."
"Certainly," Mrs. Cope said, and then she pointed the trowel up at Mrs. Pritchard and said, "I have the best kept place in the county and do you know why? Because I work. I"ve had to work to save this place and work to keep it." She emphasized each word with the trowel. "I don"t let anything get ahead of me and I"m not always looking for trouble. I take it as it comes."
"If it all come at oncet sometime," Mrs. Pritchard began.
"It doesn"t all come at once," Mrs. Cope said sharply.
The child could see over to where the dirt road joined the highway.She saw a pick-up truck stop at the gate and let off three boys who started walking up the pink dirt road. They walked single file, the middle one bent to the side carrying a black pig-shaped valise.
"Well, if it ever did," Mrs. Pritchard said, "it wouldn"t be nothing you could do but fling up your hands."
Mrs. Cope didn"t even answer this. Mrs. Pritchard folded her arms and gazed down the road as if she could easily enough see all these fine hills flattened to nothing. She saw the three boys who had almost reached the front walk by now. "Lookit yonder," she said."Who you reckon they are?"
Mrs. Cope leaned back and supported herself with one hand behind her and looked. The three" came toward them but as if they were going to walk on through the side of the house. The one with the suitcase was in front now. Finally about four feet from her, he stopped and set it down. The three boys looked something alike except that the middle-sized one wore silver-rimmed spectacles and carried the suitcase. One of his eyes had a slight cast to it so that his gaze seemed to be coming from two directions at once as if it had them surrounded. He had on a sweat shirt with a faded destroyer printed on it but his chest was so hollow that the destroyer was broken in the middle and seemed on the point of going under. His hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looked to be about thirteen. All three boys had white penetrating stares. "I don"t reckon you remember me, Mrs. Cope," he said.
"Your face is certainly familiar," she murmured, scrutinizing him."Now let"s see..."
"My daddy used to work here," he hinted.
"Boyd?" she said. "Your father was Mr. Boyd and you"re J.C.?"
"Nome, I"m Powell, the secant one, only I"ve growed some since then and my daddy he"s daid now. Done died."
"Dead. Well I declare," Mrs. Cope said as if death were always an unusual thing. "What was Mr. Boyd"s trouble?"
One of Powell"s eyes seemed to be making a circle of the place, examining the house and the white water tower behind it and the chicken houses and the pastures that rolled away on either side until they met the first line of woods. The other eye looked at her."Died in Florda," he said and began kicking the valise.
"Well I declare," she murmured. After a second she said, "And how is your mother?"
"Mah"d again." He kept watching his foot kick the suitcase.The other two boys stared at her impatiently.
"And where do you all live now?" she asked.
"Atlanta," he said. "You know, out to one of them developments."
"Well I see," she said, "I see." After a second she said it again.Finally she asked, "And who are these other boys?" and smiled at them.
"Garfield Smith him, and W. T. Harper him," he said, nodding his head backward first in the direction of the large boy and then the small one.
"How do you boys do?" Mrs. Cope said. "This is Mrs. Pritchard.
Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard work here now."
They ignored Mrs. Pritchard who watched them with steady beady eyes. The three seemed to hang there, waiting, watching Mrs. Cope.
"Well well," she said, glancing at the suitcase, "it"s nice of you to stop and see me. I think that was real sweet of you."
Powell"s stare seemed to pinch her like a pair of tongs. "Come back to see how you was doing," he said hoa.r.s.ely.
"Listen here," the smallest boy said, "all the time we been knowing him he"s been telling us about this here place. Said it was everything here. Said it was horses here. Said he had the best time of his entire life right here on this here place. Talks about it all the time."
"Never shuts his trap about this place," the big boy grunted, drawing his arm across his nose as if to m.u.f.fle his words.
"Always talking about them horses he rid here," the small one continued, "and said he would let us ride them too. Said it was one name Gene."
Mrs. Cope was always afraid someone would get hurt on her place and sue her for everything she had. "They aren"t shod," she said quickly. "There was one named Gene but he"s dead now but I"m afraid you boys can"t ride the horses because you might get hurt.They"re dangerous," she said, speaking very fast.
The large boy sat down on the ground with a noise of disgust and began to finger rocks out of his tennis shoe. The small one darted looks here and there and Powell fixed her with his stare and didn"t say anything.
After a minute the little boy said, "Say, lady, you know what he said one time? He said when he died he wanted to come here!"
For a second Mrs. Cope looked blank; then she blushed; then a peculiar look of pain came over her face as she realized that these children were hungry. They were staring because they were hungry! She almost gasped in their faces and then she asked them quickly if they would have something to eat. They said they would but their expressions, composed and unsatisfied, didn"t lighten any.They looked as if they were used to being hungry and it was no business of hers.
The child upstairs had grown red in the face with excitement.She was kneeling down by the window so that only her eyes and forehead showed over the sill. Mrs. Cope told the boys to come around on the other side of the house where the lawn chairs were and she led the way and Mrs. Pritchard followed. The child moved from the right bedroom across the hall and over into the left bedroom and looked down on the other side of the house where there were three white lawn chairs and red hammock strung between two hazelnut trees. She was a pale fat girl of twelve with a frowning squint and a large mouth full ur silver bands. She knelt down at the window.
The three boys came around the corner of the house and the large one threw himself into the hammock and lit a stub of cigarette.The small boy tumbled down on the gra.s.s next to the black suitcase and rested his head on it and Powell sat down on the edge of one of the chairs and looked as if he were trying to enclose the whole place in one encircling stare. The child heard her mother and Mrs.Pritchard in a muted conference in the kitchen. She got up and went out into the hall and leaned over the banisters.
Mrs. Cope"s and Mrs. Pritchard"s legs were facing each other in the back hall. "Those poor children are hungry." Mrs. Cope said in a dead voice.
"You seen that suitcase?" Mrs. Pritchard asked. "What if they intend to spend the night with you?"
Mrs. Cope gave a slight shriek. "I can"t have three boys in here with only me and Sally Virginia," she said. "I "m sure they"ll go when I feed them."
"I only know they got a suitcase." Mrs. Pritchard said.
The child hurried back to the window, The large boy was stretched out in the hammock with his wrists crossed under his head and the cigarette stub in the center of his mouth. He spit it out in an arc just as Mrs. Cope came around the corner of the house with a plate of crackers. She stopped instantly as if a snake had been slung in her path. "Ashfield!" she said. "Please pick that up. I"m afraid of fires."
"Gawfield!" the little boy shouted indignantly. "Gawfield!"
The large boy raised himself without a word and lumbered for the b.u.t.t. He picked it up and put it in his pocket and stood with his back to her, examining a tattooed heart on his forearm. Mrs.Pritchard came up holding three Coca-Colas by the necks in one hand and gave one to each of them.
"I remember everything about this place," Powell said, looking down the opening of his bottle.
"Where did you all go when you left here?" Mrs. Cope asked and put the plate of crackers on the arm of his chair.
He looked at it but didn"t take one. He said, "I remember it was one name Gene and it was one name George, We gone to Florda and my daddy he, you know, died, and then we gone to my sister"s and then my mother she, you know, mah"d, and we been there ever since. "
"There are some crackers," Mrs. Cope said and sat down in the chair across from him.
"He don"t like it in Atlanta," the little boy said, sitting up and reaching indifferently for a cracker. "He ain"t ever satisfied with where he"s at except this place here. Lemme tell you what he"ll do, lady. We"ll be playing ball, see, on this here place in this development we got to play ball on, see, and he"ll quit playing and say, "G.o.ddam, it was a horse down there name Gene and if I had him here I"d bust this concrete to h.e.l.l riding him!""
"I"m sure Powell doesn"t use words like that, do you, Powell?"Mrs. Cope said.
"No, mam," Powell said. His head was turned completely to the side as if he were listening for the horses in the field, "I don"t like them kind of crackers," the little boy said and returned his to the plate and got up.