After a moment the girl"s eyes closed and she turned her head wearily to the side.
The doctor rose and handed the nurse the empty syringe.He leaned over and put both hands for a moment on the mother"s shoulders, which were shaking. She was sitting on the floor, her lips pressed together, holding Mary Grace"s hand in her lap. The girl"s fingers were gripped like a baby"s around her thumb. "Go on to the hospital," he said. "I"ll call and make the arrangements."
"Now let"s see that neck," he said in a jovial voice to Mrs. Turpin. He began to inspect her neck with his first two fingers. Two little moon-shaped lines like pink fish bones were indented over her windpipe. There was the beginning of an angry red swelling above her eye. His fingers pa.s.sed over this also.
"Lea" me be," she said thickly and shook him off. "See about Claud. She kicked him."
"I"ll see about him in a minute," he said and felt her pulse. He was a thin grey-haired man, given to pleasantries."Go home and have yourself a vacation the rest of the day," he said and patted her on the shoulder.
Quit your pattin me, Mrs. Turpin growled to herself.
"And put an ice pack over that eye," he said. Then he went and squatted down beside Claud and looked at his leg. After a moment he pulled him up and Claud limped after him into the office.
Until the ambulance came, the only sounds in the room were the tremulous moans of the girl"s mother, who continued to sit on the floor, The whitetrash woman did not take her eyes off the girl. Mrs. Turpin looked straight ahead at nothing. Presently the ambulance drew up, a long dark shadow, behind the curtain. The attendants came in and set the stretcher down beside the girl and lifted her expertly onto it and carried her out. The nurse helped the mother gather up her things. The shadow of the ambulance moved silently away and the nurse came back in the office.
"That ther girl is going to be a lunatic, ain"t she?" the white-trash woman asked the nurse, but the nurse kept on to the back and never answered her.
"Yes, she"s going to be a lunatic," the whitetrash woman said to the rest of them.
"Po" critter," the old woman murmured. The child"s face was still in her lap. His eyes looked idly out over her knees.He had not moved during the disturbance except to draw one leg up under him.
"I thank Gawd," the white-trash woman said fervently, "I ain"t a lunatic."
Claud came limping out and the Turpins went home.
As their pick-up truck turned into their own dirt road and made the crest of the hill, Mrs. Turpin gripped the window ledge and looked out suspiciously. The land sloped gracefully down through a field dotted with lavender weeds and at the start of the rise their small yellow frame house, with its little flower beds spread out around it like a fancy ap.r.o.n, sat primly in its accustomed place between two giant hickory trees. She would not have been startled to see a burnt wound between two blackened chimneys.
Neither of them felt like eating so they put on their house clothes and lowered the shade in the bedroom and lay down, Claud with his leg on a pillow and herself with a damp washcloth over her eye. The instant she was Hat on her back, the image of a razor-backed hog with warts on its face and horns coming out behind its ears snorted into her head.She moaned, a low quiet moan.
"I am not," she said tearfully, "a wart hog. From h.e.l.l."But the denial had no force. The girl"s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.
She rose on her elbow and the washcloth fell into her hand. Claud was lying on his back, snoring. She wanted to tell him what the girl had said. At the same time, she did not wish to put the image of herself as a wart hog from h.e.l.l into his mind.
"Hey, Claud," she muttered and pushed his shoulder.
Claud opened one pale baby blue eye.
She looked into it warily. He did not think about anything.He just went his way.
"Wha, whasit?" he said and closed the eye again.
"Nothing," she said. "Does your leg pain you?"
"Hurts like h.e.l.l," Claud said.
"It"ll quit terreckly," she said and lay back down. In a moment Claud was snoring again. For the rest of the afternoon they lay there. Claud slept. She scowled at the ceiling.Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.
About five-thirty Claud stirred. "Got to go after those n.i.g.g.e.rs," he sighed, not moving.
She was looking straight up as if there were unintelligible handwriting on the ceiling. The protuberance over her eye had turned a greenish-blue. "Listen here," she said.
"What?"
"Kiss me."
Claud leaned over and kissed her loudly on the mouth.He pinched her side and their hands interlocked. Her expression of ferocious concentration did not change. Claud got up, groaning and growling, and limped off. She continued to study the ceiling.
She did not get up until she heard the pick-up truck coming back with the Negroes. Then she rose and thrust her feet in her brown oxfords, which she did not bother to lace, and stumped out onto the back porch and got her red plastic bucket. She emptied a tray of ice cubes into in and filled it half full of water and went out into the back yard. Every afternoon after Claud brought the hands in, one of the boys helped him put out hay and the rest waited in the back of the truck until he was ready to take them home. The truck was parked in the shade under one of the hickory trees.
"Hi yawl this evening?" Mrs. Turpin asked grimly, appearing with the bucket and the dipper. There were three women and a boy in the truck.
"Us doin nicely," the oldest woman said. "Hi you doin?" and her gaze stuck immediately on the dark lump on Mrs.Turpin"s forehead. "You done fell down, ain"t you?" she asked in a solicitous voice. The old woman was dark and almost toothless. She had on an old felt hat of Claud"s set back on her head. The other two women were younger and lighter and they both had new bright green sun hats. One of them had hers on her head; the other had taken hers off and the boy was grinning beneath it.
Mrs. Turpin set the bucket down on the floor of the truck. "Yawl hep yourselves," she said. She looked around to make sure Claud had gone. "No. I didn"t fall down," she said, folding her arms. "It was something worse than that."
"Ain"t nothing bad happen to you!" the old woman said.She said it as if they all knew that Mrs. Turpin was protected in some special way by Divine Providence. "You just had you a little fall."
"We were in town at the doctor"s office for where the cow kicked Mr. Turpin," Mrs. Turpin said in a Hat tone that indicated they could leave off their foolishness. "And there was this girl there. A big fat girl with her face all broke out.I could look at that girl and tell she was peculiar but I couldn"t tell how. And me and her mama were just talking and going along and all of a sudden WHAM! She throws this big book she was reading at me and..."
"Naw!"the old woman cried out.
"And then she jumps over the table and commences to choke me."
"Naw!" they all exclaimed, "naw!"
"Hi come she do that?" the old woman asked. "What ail her?"
Mrs. Turpin only glared in front of her.
"Somethin ail her," the old woman said.
"They carried her off in an ambulance," Mrs. Turpin continued, "but before she went she was rolling on the floor and they were trying to hold her down to give her a shot and she said something to me." She paused. "You know what she said to me?"
"What she say?"they asked.
"She said," Mrs. Turpin began, and stopped, her face very dark and heavy. The sun was getting whiter and whiter, blanching the sky overhead so that the leaves of the hickory tree were black in the "face of it. She could not bring forth the words. "Something real ugly," she muttered.
"She sho shouldn"t said nothin ugly to you," the old woman said. "You so sweet. You the sweetest lady I know."
"She pretty too," the one with the hat on said.
"And stout," the other one said. "I never knowed no sweeter white lady."
"That"s the truth befo" Jesus," the old woman said.
"Amen! You des as sweet and pretty as you can be."
Mrs. Turpin knew just exactly how much Negro flattery was worth and it added to her rage. "She said," she began again and finished this time with a fierce rush of breath, "that I was an old wart hog from h.e.l.l."
There was an astounded silence.
"Where she at?" the youngest woman cried in a piercing voice.
"Lemme see her. I"ll kill her!"
"I"ll kill her with you!" the other one cried.
"She b"long in the sylum," the old woman said emphatically.
"You the sweetest white lady I know."
"She pretty too," the other two said. "Stout as she can be and sweet. Jesus satisfiedwith her!"
"Deed he is," the old woman declared.
Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. You could never say anything intelligent to a n.i.g.g.e.r. You could talk at them but not with them. "Yawl ain"t drunk your water," she said shortly. "Leave the bucket in the truck when you"re finished with it. I got more to do than just stand around and pa.s.s the time of day," and she moved off and into the house.
She stood for a moment in the middle of the kitchen.The dark protuberance over her eye looked like a miniature tornado cloud which might any moment sweep across the horizon of her brow. Her lower lip protruded dangerously.She squared her ma.s.sive shoulders. Then she marched into the front of the house and out the side door and started down the road to the pig parlor. She had the look of a woman going single-handed, weaponless, into battle.
The sun was a deep yellow now like a harvest moon and was riding westward very fast over the far tree line as if it meant to reach the hogs before she did. The road was rutted and she kicked several good-sized stones out of her path as she strode along. The pig parlor was on a little knoll at the end of a lane that ran off from the side of the barn. It was a square of concrete as large as a small room, with a board fence about four feet high around it. The concrete floor sloped slightly so that the hog wash could drain off into a trench where it was carried to the field for fertilizer. Claud was standing on the outside, on the edge of the concrete, hanging onto the top board, hosing down the floor inside. The hose was connected to the faucet of a water trough nearby.
Mrs. Turpin climbed up beside him and glowered down at the hogs inside. There were seven long-snouted bristly shoats in it-tan with liver-colored spots-and an old sow a few weeks off from farrowing. She was lying on her side grunting. The shoats were running about shaking themselves like idiot children, their little slit pig eyes searching the floor for anything left. She had read that pigs were the most intelligent animal. She doubted it. They were supposed to be smarter than dogs. There had even been a pig astronaut.He had performed his a.s.signment perfectly but died of a heart attack afterwards because they left him in his electric suit, sitting upright throughout his examination when naturally a hog should be on all fours.
A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin.
"Gimme that hose," she said, yanking it away from Claud. "Go on and carry them n.i.g.g.e.rs home and then get off that leg."
"You look like you might have swallowed a mad dog,"Claud observed, but he got down and limped off. He paid no attention to her humors.
Until he was out of earshot, Mrs. Turpin stood on the side of the pen, holding the hose and pointing the stream of water at the hind quarters of any shoat that looked as if it might try to lie down. When he had had time to get over the hill, she turned her head slightly and her wrathful eyes scanned the path. He was nowhere in sight. She turned back again and seemed to gather herself up. Her shoulders rose and she drew in her breath.
"What do you send me a message like that for?" she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. "How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from h.e.l.l too?" Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.
The pig parlor commanded a view of the back pasture where their twenty beef cows were gathered around the hay-bales Claud and the boy had put out. The freshly cut pasture sloped down to the highway. Across it was their cotton field and beyond that a dark green dusty wood which they owned as well. The sun was behind the wood, very red, looking over the paling of trees like a farmer inspecting his own hogs.
"Why me?" she rumbled. "It"s no trash around here. black or white, that I haven"t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church."
She appeared to be the right size woman to command the arena before her. "How am I a hog?" she demanded."Exactly how am I like them?" and she jabbed the stream of water at the shoats. "There was plenty of trash there.It didn"t have to be me.
"If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then," she railed. "You could have made me trash. Or a n.i.g.g.e.r. If trash is what you wanted why didn"t you make me trash?" She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. "I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy," she growled."Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer.Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face. I could be nasty.
Or you could have made me a n.i.g.g.e.r. It"s too late for me to be a n.i.g.g.e.r," she said with deep sarcasm, "but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground."
In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious hue. The pasture was growing a peculiar gla.s.sy green and the streak of highway had turned lavender. She braced herself for a final a.s.sault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. "Go on," she yelled, "call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From h.e.l.l. Call me a wart hog from h.e.l.l.Put that bottom rail on top. There"ll still be a top and bottom!"
A garbled echo returned to her.
A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, "Who do you think you are?"
The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.
She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.
A tiny truck, Claud"s, appeared on the highway, heading rapidly out of sight. Its gears sc.r.a.ped thinly. It looked like a child"s toy. At any moment a bigger truck might smash into it and scatter Claud"s and the n.i.g.g.e.rs" brains all over the road.
Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them.They appeared to pant with a secret life.
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs.Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes.She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of whitetrash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black n.i.g.g.e.rs in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the G.o.d-given wit to use it right.She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house.In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
Parker"s Back(1965)
Parker"s wife was sitting on the front porch floor, snapping beans. Parker was sitting on the step, some distance away, watching her sullenly. She was plain, plain. The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were grey and sharp like the points of two icepicks. Parker understood why he had married her-he couldn"t have got her any other way-but he couldn"t understand why he stayed with her now. She was pregnant and pregnant women were not his favorite kind. Nevertheless, he stayed as if she had him conjured. He was puzzled and ashamed of himself.
The house they rented sat alone save for a single tall pecan tree on a high embankment overlooking a highway.At intervals a car would shoot past below and his wife"s eyes would swerve suspiciously after the sound of it and then come back to rest on the newspaper full of beans in her lap. One of the things she did not approve of was automobiles.In addition to her other bad qualities, she was forever sniffingup sin. She did not smoke or dip, drink whiskey, use bad language or paint her face, and G.o.d knew some paint would have improved it, Parker thought. Her being against color, it was the more remarkable she had married him. Sometimes he supposed that she had married him because she meant to save him. At other times he had a suspicion that she actually liked everything she said she didn"t. He could account for her one way or another; it was himself he could not understand.
She turned her head in his direction and said, "It"s no reason you can"t work for a man. It don"t have to be a woman."
"Aw shut your mouth for a change," Parker muttered.
If he had been certain she was jealous of the woman he worked for he would have been pleased but more likely she was concerned with the sin that would result if he and the woman took a liking to each other. He had told her that the woman was a hefty young blonde; in fact she was nearly seventy years old and too dried up to have an interest in anything except getting as much work out of him as she could. Not that an old woman didn"t sometimes get an interest in a young man, particularly if he was as attractive as Parker felt he was, but this old woman looked at him the same way she looked at her old tractor-as if she had to put up with it because it was all she had. The tractor had broken down the second day Parker was on it and she had set him at once to cutting bushes, saying out of the side of her mouth to the n.i.g.g.e.r, "Everything he touches, he breaks."She also asked him to wear his shirt when he worked; Parker had removed it even though the day was not sultry; he put it back on reluctantly.
This ugly woman Parker married was his first wife.He had had other women but he had planned never to get himself tied up legally. He had first seen her one morning when his truck broke down on the highway. He had managed to pull it off the road into a neatly swept yard on which sat a peeling two-room house. He got out and opened the hood of the truck and began to study the motor.Parker had an extra sense that told him when there was a woman nearby watching him. After he had leaned over the motor a few minutes, his neck began to p.r.i.c.kle. He cast his eye over the empty yard and porch of the house. A woman he could not see was either nearby beyond a clump of honeysuckle or in the house, watching him out the window.
Suddenly Parker began to jump up and down and fling his hand about as if he had mashed it in the machinery. He doubled over and held his hand close to his chest. "G.o.d dammit!" he hollered, "Jesus Christ in h.e.l.l! Jesus G.o.d Almighty damm! G.o.d dammit to h.e.l.l!" he went on, flinging out the same few oaths over and over as loud as he could.
Without warning a terrible bristly claw slammed the side of his face and he fell backwards on the hood of the truck. "You don"t talk no filth here!" a voice close to him shrilled.
Parker"s vision was so blurred that for an instant he thought he had been attacked by some creature from above, a giant hawk-eyed angel wielding a h.o.a.ry weapon. As his sight cleared, he saw before him a tall raw-boned girl with a broom.
"I hurt my hand," he said. "I HURT my hand." He was so incensed that he forgot that he hadn"t hurt his hand. "My hand may be broke," he growled although his voice was still unsteady.
"Lemme see it," the girl demanded.
Parker stuck out his hand and she came closer and looked at it. There was no mark on the palm and she took the hand and turned it over. Her own hand was dry and hot and rough and Parker felt himself jolted back to life by her touch. He looked more closely at her. I don"t want nothing to do with this one, he thought.
The girl"s sharp eyes peered at the back of the stubby reddish hand she held. There emblazoned in red and blue was a tattooed eagle perched on a cannon. Parker"s sleeve was rolled to the elbow. Above the eagle a serpent was coiled about a shield and in the s.p.a.ces between the eagle and the serpent there were hearts, some with arrows through them. Above the serpent there was a spread hand of cards.Every s.p.a.ce on the skin of Parker"s arm, from wrist to elbow, was covered in some loud design, The girl gazed at this with an almost stupefied smile of shock, as if she had accidentally grasped a poisonous snake; she dropped the hand.
"I got most of my other ones in foreign parts," Parker said. "These here I mostly got in the United States. I got my first one when I was only fifteen year old."
"Don"t tell me," the girl said, "I don"t like it. I ain"t got any use for it."
"You ought to see the ones you can"t see," Parker said and winked.