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Authors: William Styron

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BOOK: A Tidewater Morning
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“Watah!” I heard him cry feebly,
“Watah!”
I slid out of his lap, watched the scrawny black legs no bigger around than pine saplings begin to shake and twitch. “Watah, please!” I heard the voice implore, but Little Mole and I needed no further urging; we were gone—racing headlong to the kitchen and the cluttered, reeking sink. “That old cullud man’s dying!” Little Mole wailed. We got a cracked jelly glass, ran water from the faucet in a panic, speculating as we did: Little Mole ventured the notion of a heat stroke; I theorized a heart attack. We screamed and babbled; we debated whether the water should be at body temperature or iced. Little Mole added half a cupful of salt, then decided that the water should be hot. Our long delay was fortunate, for several moments later, as we hurried with the terrible potion to Shadrach’s side, we found that the elder Dabney had appeared from a far corner of the yard and, taking command of the emergency, had pried Shadrach away from the seat of the Pierce-Arrow, dragged or carried him across the plot of bare earth, propped him up against a tree trunk, and now stood sluicing water from a garden hose into Shadrach’s gaping mouth. The old man gulped his fill. Then Mr. Dabney, small and fiercely intent in his baggy overalls, hunched down over the stricken patriarch, whipped out a pint bottle from his pocket, and poured a stream of crystalline whiskey down Shadrach’s gorge. While he did this he muttered to himself in tones of incredulity and inwardly tickled amazement: “Well, kiss my ass! Who are you, old uncle? Just who in the goddamned hell
are
you?”

We heard Shadrach give a strangled cough; then he began to try out something resembling speech. But the word he was almost able to produce was swallowed and lost in the hollow of his throat.

“What did he say? What did he say?” Mr. Dabney demanded impatiently.

“He said his name is Shadrach!” I shouted, proud that I alone seemed able to fathom this obscure Negro dialect, further muddied by the crippled cadences of senility.

“What’s he want, Paul?” Mr. Dabney said to me.

I bent my face toward Shadrach’s , which looked contented again. His voice in my ear was at once whispery and sweet, a gargle of beatitude: “Die on Dabney ground.”

“I think he said,” I told Mr. Dabney at last, “that he wants to die on Dabney ground.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” said Mr. Dabney.

“Praise de Lawd!” Shadrach cried suddenly, in a voice that even Mr. Dabney could understand. “Ise arrived in Ole Virginny!”

Mr. Dabney roared at me: “Ask him where he came from!”

Again I inclined my face to that black shrunken visage upturned to the blazing sun; I whispered the question and the reply came back after a long silence, in fitful stammerings. At last I said to Mr. Dabney: “He says he’s from Clay County down in Alabama.”

“Alabama!
Well, kiss my ass!”

I felt Shadrach pluck at my sleeve and once more I bent down to listen. Many seconds passed before I could discover the outlines of the words struggling for meaning on the flailing, ungovernable tongue. But finally I captured their shapes, arranged them in order.

“What did he say now, Paul?” Mr. Dabney said.

“He said he wants you to bury him.”

“Bury him!”
Mr. Dabney shouted. “How can I bury him? He ain’t even dead yet!”

From Shadrach’s breast there now came a gentle keening sound which, commencing on a note of the purest grief, startled me by the way it resolved itself suddenly into a mild faraway chuckle; the moonshine was taking hold. The pink clapper of a tongue lolled in the cave of the jagged old mouth. Shadrach grinned.

“Ask him how old he is, Paul,” came the command. I asked him. “Nimenime” was the glutinous reply.

“He says he’s ninety-nine years old,” I reported, glancing up from the ageless abyss.

“Ninety-nine!
Well, I’ll be goddamned!”

Now other Dabneys began to arrive, including the mother, Trixie, and the two larger Moles, along with one of the older teenage daughters, whalelike but meltingly beautiful as she floated on the crest of her pregnancy, and accompanied by her hulking, acne-cratered teenage spouse. There also came a murmuring clutch of neighbors—sun-reddened shipyard workers in cheap sport shirts, scampering towhead children, a quartet of scrawny housewives in sacklike dresses, bluish crescents of sweat beneath their arms. In my memory they make an aching tableau of those exhausted years. They jabbered and clucked in wonder at Shadrach, who, immobilized by alcohol, heat, infirmity, and his ninety-nine Augusts, beamed and raised his rheumy eyes to the sun. “Praise de Lawd!” he quavered.

We hoisted him to his feet and supported the frail, almost weightless old frame as he limped on dancing tiptoe to the house, where we settled him down upon a rumpsprung glider that squatted on the back porch in an ambient fragrance of dog urine, tobacco smoke, and mildew. “You hungry, Shad?” Mr. Dabney bellowed. “Mama, get Shadrach something to eat!” Slumped in the glider, the ancient visitor gorged himself like one plucked from the edge of critical starvation: he devoured three cantaloupes, slurped down bowl after bowl of Rice Krispies, and gummed his way through a panful of hot cornbread smeared with lard. We watched silently, in wonderment. Before our solemnly attentive eyes he gently and carefully eased himself back on the malodorous pillows and with a soft sigh went to sleep.

Some time after this—during the waning hours of the afternoon, when Shadrach woke up, and then on into the evening—the mystery of the old man’s appearance became gradually unlocked. One of the Dabney daughters was a fawn-faced creature of twelve named Edmonia; her fragile beauty (especially when contrasted with ill-favored brothers) and her precocious breasts and bottom had caused me—young as I was—a troubling, unresolved itch. I was awed by the ease and nonchalance with which she wiped the drool from Shadrach’s lips. Like me, she possessed some inborn gift of interpretation, and through our joint efforts there was pieced together over several hours an explanation for this old man—for his identity and his bizarre and inescapable coming.

He stayed on the glider; we put another pillow under his head. Nourishing his dragon’s appetite with Hershey bars and, later on, with nips from Mr. Dabney’s bottle, we were able to coax from those aged lips a fragmented, abbreviated, but reasonably coherent biography. After a while it became an anxious business for, as one of the adults noticed, old Shad seemed to be running a fever; his half-blind eyes swam about from time to time, and the clotted phlegm that rose in his throat made it all the more difficult to understand anything. But somehow we began to divine the truth. One phrase, repeated over and over, I particularly remember: ‘Ise a Dabney.‘ And indeed those words provided the chief clue to his story.

Born a slave on the Dabney plantation in King and Queen County, he had been sold down to Alabama in the decades before the Civil War. Shadrach’s memory was imperfect regarding the date of his sale. Once he said “fifty,” meaning 1850, and another time he said “fiftyfive,” but it was an item of little importance; he was probably somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five years old when his master—Vernon Dabney’s great-grandfather—disposed of him, selling him to one of the many traders prowling the worn-out Virginia soil of that stricken bygone era; and since in his confessional to us, garbled as it was, he used the word “coffle” (a word beyond my ten-year-old knowledge but one whose meaning I later understood), he must have journeyed those six hundred miles to Alabama on foot and in the company of God knows how many other black slaves, linked together by chains.

So now, as we began slowly to discover, this was Shadrach’s return trip home to Ole Virginny—three quarters of a century or thereabouts after his departure from the land out of which he had sprung, which had nurtured him, and where he had lived his happy years. Happy? Who knows? But we had to assume they were his happy years—else why this incredible pilgrimage at the end of his life? As he had announced with such abrupt fervor earlier, he wanted only to die and be buried on “Dabney ground.”

We learned that after the war he had become a sharecropper, that he had married three times and had had many children (once he said twelve, another time fifteen; no matter, they were legion); he had outlived them all, wives and offspring. Even the grandchildren had died off, or had somehow vanished. “Ah was dibested of all mah plenty” was another statement I can still record verbatim. Thus divested and (as he cheerfully made plain to all who gathered around him to listen) sensing mortality in his own shriveled flesh and bones, he had departed Alabama on foot—just as he had come there—to find the Virginia of his youth.

Six hundred miles! The trip, we were able to gather, took over four months, since he said he set out from Clay County in the early spring. He walked nearly the entire way, although now and then he would accept a ride—almost always, one can be sure, from the few Negroes who owned cars in the rural South of those years. He had saved up a few dollars, which allowed him to provide for his stomach. He slept on the side of the road or in barns; sometimes a friendly Negro family would give him shelter. The trek took him across Georgia and the Carolinas and through Southside Virginia. His itinerary is still anyone’s conjecture. Because he could not read either road sign or road map, he obviously followed his own northward-questing nose, a profoundly imperfect method of finding one’s way (he allowed to Edmonia with a faint cackle), since he once got so far astray that he ended up not only miles away from the proper highway but in a city and state completely off his route—Chattanooga, Tennessee. But he circled back and moved on. And how, once arrived in Virginia with its teeming Dabneys, did he discover the only Dabney who would matter, the single Dabney who was not merely the proprietor of his birthplace but the one whom he also unquestioningly expected to oversee his swiftly approaching departure, laying him to rest in the earth of their mutual ancestors? How did he find
Vernon Dabney?
Mr. Dabney was by no means an illspirited or ungenerous man (despite his runaway temper), but was a soul nonetheless beset by many woes in the dingy threadbare year 1935, being hard pressed not merely for dollars but for dimes and quarters, crushed beneath an elephantine and inebriate wife, along with three generally shiftless sons and two knocked-up daughters, plus two more likely to be so, and living with the abiding threat of revenue agents swooping down to terminate his livelihood and, perhaps, get him sent to the Atlanta penitentiary for five or six years. He needed no more cares or burdens, and now in the hot katydidshrill hours of summer night I saw him gaze down at the leathery old dying black face with an expression that mingled compassion and bewilderment and stoppered-up rage and desperation, and then whisper to himself: “He wants to die on Dabney ground! Well, kiss my ass, just kiss my ass!” Plainly he wondered how, among all his horde of Virginia kinfolk, Shadrach found
him,
for he squatted low and murmured: “Shad! Shad, how come you knew who to look for?” But in his fever Shadrach had drifted off to sleep, and so far as I ever knew there was never any answer to that.

The next day it was plain that Shadrach was badly off. During the night he had somehow fallen from the glider, and in the early morning hours he was discovered on the floor, leaking blood. We bandaged him up. The wound just above his ear was superficial, as it turned out, but it had done him no good; and when he was replaced on the swing he appeared to be confused and at the edge of delirium, plucking at his shirt, whispering, and rolling his gentle opaque eyes at the ceiling. Whenever he spoke now, his words were beyond the power of Edmonia or me to comprehend, faint highpitched mumbo jumbo in a drowned dialect. He seemed to recognize no one. Trixie, leaning over the old man as she sucked at her first Pabst Blue Ribbon of the morning, decided firmly that there was no time to waste. “Shoog,” she said to Mr. Dabney, using her habitual pet name (diminutive form of Sugar), “you better get out the car if we're goin' to the Farm. I think he ain’t gone last much longer.” And so, given unusual parental leave to go along on the trip, I squeezed myself into the backseat of the Model T, privileged to hold in my lap a huge greasy paper bag full of fried chicken which Trixie had prepared for noontime dinner at the Farm.

Not all of the Dabneys made the journey—the two older daughters and the largest Mole were left behind—but we still composed a multitude. We children were packed sweatily skin to skin and atop each other’s laps in the rear seat, which reproduced in miniature the messiness of the house with this new litter of empty RC Cola and Nehi bottles, funny papers, watermelon rinds, banana peels, greasy jack handles, oil-smeared gears of assorted sizes, and wads of old Kleenex. On the floor beneath my feet I even discerned (to my intense discomfort, for I had just learned to recognize such an object) a crumpled, yellowish used condom, left there haphazardly, I was certain, by one of the older daughters’ boyfriends who had been able to borrow the heap for carnal sport. It was a bright summer day, scorchingly hot like the day preceding it, but the car had no workable windows and we were pleasantly ventilated. Shadrach sat in the middle of the front seat. Mr. Dabney was hunched over the wheel, chewing at a wad of tobacco and driving with black absorption; he had stripped to his undershirt, and I thought I could almost see the rage and frustration in the tight bunched muscles of his neck. He muttered curses at the balky gearshift but otherwise said little, rapt in his guardian misery. So voluminous that the flesh of her shoulders fell in a freckled cascade over the back of her seat, Trixie loomed on the other side of Shadrach; the corpulence of her body seemed in some way to both enfold and support the old man, who nodded and dozed. The encircling hair around the shiny black head was, I thought, like a delicate halo of the purest frost or foam. Curiously, for the first time since Shadrach’s coming, I felt a stab of grief and achingly wanted him not to die. “Shoog,” said Trixie, standing by the rail of the dumpy little ferry that crossed the York River, “what kind of big birds do you reckon those are behind that boat there?” The Model T had been the first car aboard, and all of us had flocked out to look at the river, leaving Shadrach to sit there and sleep during the fifteen-minute ride. The water was blue, sparkling with whitecaps, lovely. A huge gray naval tug with white markings chugged along to the mine depot at Yorktown, trailing eddies of garbage and a swooping flock of frantic gulls. Their squeals echoed across the peaceful channel.

BOOK: A Tidewater Morning
9.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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