Of Love and Dust (8 page)

But one look at the fence, and Marcus changed his mind and went back out the yard. A second later Aunt Ca’line saw him coming back up Pauline’s walk.

“Miss Guerin,” he said.

Pauline didn’t speak and Marcus sat on the steps. It got quiet again. Every now and then Aunt Ca’line would swing her mosquito rag at a mosquito singing round her ear. Pa
Bully had put away his hat for his pipe now, and Aunt Ca’line could hear the soft sucking on the cob pipe and then see a little stream of smoke every time Pa Bully heard or even felt a mosquito might be heading his way.

“Mr. Grant,” Aunt Ca’line said, warningly.

Because, according to Aunt Ca’line, she had caught Pa Bully cutting his eyes toward the other side of that fence where they had no business going.

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Aunt Ca’line had been saying “Mr. Grant” warningly like that ever since the other one first started coming to the house: that was seven or eight years ago. The other one had never sat out on the gallery. He didn’t have to, because it had started long before he came there. It had started in the field, where he had all the right to call her over into a patch of corn or cotton or cane or the ditch—the one he was closest to—and make her lay down and pull up her dress. Then after he had satisfied his lust, he would get back on the horse like nothing had happened. And she would pull down her dress and go back to the work she was doing before he had called her to him. The other women wouldn’t say anything to her, and she wouldn’t say anything, either—like nothing in the world had happened.

But something had happened to Bonbon. At first he had laid with all and any of them. When his lust was up he had called the one closest to him. But after being with so many, now he settled for one. And when she saw what had happened, she saw her chance to make life a little sweeter.

“I’m tired of this field,” she told him. “I want get in that house. I’ll cook, I’ll be his maid, but I’m tired of this field.”

Bonbon told Marshall Hebert he was bringing her there.
Marshall Hebert couldn’t say anything because Bonbon already knew something about Marshall’s past. Marshall told him to bring her; then he tried to break the news to Miss Julie Rand gently as possible. But, according to Aunt Ca’line, he could have saved his breath because Miss Julie had expected that this was coming all the time.

When Pauline came to the big house she quit wearing the gingham dresses she had worn in the field. Now she wore light-color dresses that had printed flowers on them. She bought two big white straw hats—one had a red ribbon and one had a green ribbon round the band. She wore loafers and not the hard work shoes the other women wore in the field. But only Pauline’s clothes had changed; she stayed pretty much the same person. From what I heard and knew about her she had always been very quiet. She was kind to everyone and had a lot of respect for the old people on the plantation. She didn’t go to church but nobody had ever heard her saying anything against it. When she first started working at the big house a lot of people in the quarter felt the same way she did: they knew that long as she lived on the plantation she would have to lay with Bonbon if he wanted her to. So why not make the best of it? Why not get out of the hot sun? Why not wear better clothes, why not eat better food? Then there were the other people in the quarter who pretended she was sinning more than any of them had ever done. They did all they could to hurt her, but she took all their insults with a little smile that said, “If he had chose you, where would you be right now?”

It wasn’t too long after Pauline went to the big house that Aunt Ca’line started warning Pa Bully about his eyes and his tongue. She would never say, “Mind your own business”; she would never say, “Bring your eyes back where they belong” or “Stop up your ears.” She would say only two words,
“Mr. Grant”; and Pa Bully understood exactly what those two words meant. It had started the first night that Bonbon came to the house. It was summer just like it was now, and he had tied the horse at the gate and walked toward the house just like it was his own. He had not said anything to Aunt Ca’line or Pa Bully; he had said something softly to Pauline, who had been sitting in a chair by the door, and she had followed him inside. They had talked a few minutes, then they had gotten on the bed. Anybody who ever slept on a cornshuck mattress don’t have to be told the noise one can make, Aunt Ca’line said. And Pauline’s moaning round there didn’t pacify matters at all.

“Good Lord,” Pa Bully said. “What the world he got there?”

“Mr. Grant,” Aunt Ca’line said, warningly.

After a while Bonbon came out and got on the horse and rode away, and a few minutes later Pauline came back on the gallery. Aunt Ca’line and Pa Bully pretended they hadn’t been listening to anything. Farther up the quarter the people were singing in the church.

“Ain’t that Cobb doing the leading?” Pa Bully asked Aunt Ca’line.

“Sounds like his voice,” Aunt Ca’line said. She listened to the singing a while. “That’s Cobb,” she said. “Who else got a heavy voice like that.”

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Less than a year after that night, Pauline had twins. But she still wasn’t in love with Bonbon. If he had walked out on her anytime, she would have gone with somebody else who would have been very glad to have her. Not because she had once belonged to this white man, but because she was still as decent as any other black woman on the place could be around him. But he didn’t walk out on her, he came to her more regularly now. He didn’t pick up the twins and bounce them on his knees like he would do his little girl later, but he did bring them food and clothes. He gave them toys at Christmas and he gave them pennies on Saturday to put in Sunday School. No, he didn’t give the money to the children, he gave it to Pauline to give to them. Because he and the twins could never have any close-ness at all. They could never call him papa no matter how many times they heard him in the bed with mama. They couldn’t even carry his name. They were called Guerin like their mother. Billy and Willy Guerin—and they were probably the worst two Billy and Willy the Good Lord had suffered for.

Bonbon was in love with Pauline when he brought her to the big house, but it took years for Pauline to fall in love with Bonbon. She didn’t want to fall in love with this white man because she knew nothing good could come of it. She knew she would have to be his woman long as she lived on the plantation and long as he wanted her, but she didn’t want to hold any feeling for him at all. She wanted it to be
“come and go” and nothing else. She figured that after a while it would come to an end, anyhow.

But it didn’t come to an end. Aunt Ca’line said Bonbon didn’t miss coming there a week after he started. He came summer and winter. When the weather was good he usually came in the truck. When it had rained he would come on the horse because the truck would get stalled in the mud. Many times he got wet coming down the quarter and he would have to change his clothes at the fireplace and wrap a blanket round him while Pauline dried the clothes on the back of a chair.

After so many years, Pauline did fall in love with Bonbon. She couldn’t help but fall in love with him. She knew he loved her more than he did his wife up the quarter or his people who lived on the river.

So now the shuck mattress was quiet. There wasn’t any need for all the noise, because now Bonbon and Pauline’s love was much softer—more tender. Aunt Ca’line and Pa Bully could hardly hear the mattress at all from their room. The twins sleeping on their bed in the kitchen probably couldn’t hear the mattress either.

But this was not the only place where Pauline and Bonbon went together. Sometimes it happened at the big house while they made Bishop, Marshall Hebert’s butler, look out for Marshall. Bishop hated what he had to do—but what else could he do? If he had mentioned to Marshall that Bonbon had gone farther than that kitchen, Bonbon, or Marshall himself, probably would have killed him. So he kept his mouth shut. He went out on the front gallery and looked out for Marshall like Bonbon told him to do. Since he wasn’t supposed to be out there unless he was cleaning up or serving someone, Bishop had to keep himself hid. There was a palm tree on the left side of the gallery and he stood behind
the tree all the time he was out there. Sometimes he had to stay there an hour. If Bonbon went to sleep he would have to stay even longer.

Marshall never did catch Pauline and Bonbon, but even if he had he probably wouldn’t have done anything about it. Bonbon already had something on Marshall, and long as he held this proof Marshall couldn’t do a thing but go along with him no matter what he did. This went for stealing, too. Marshall knew Bonbon was stealing from him. He had seen a lantern in the crib at night; he had heard the children laughing in there while they shelled corn that Bonbon was going to sell in Bayonne the next day. Marshall had missed hogs, he had missed cows—he had even missed bales of cotton from the barn. But since he couldn’t do a thing about it, he pretended that it wasn’t happening.

Bonbon was a simple man and a brutal man, was the way Aunt Ca’line described him. He was brutal because he had been brought up in a brute-taught world and in brute-taught times. The big house had given him a horse and a whip (he did have a whip at first) and they had told him to ride behind the blacks in the field and get as much work out of them as he could. He did this, but he did more: he fell in love with one of the black women. He couldn’t just take her like he was supposed to take her, like they had given him permission to take her—no, he had to fall in love. When the children came he loved them, too. He couldn’t tell them he loved them, he wasn’t allowed to tell them that. He probably never told it to Pauline, and maybe he never told it to himself. But he could feel it, and when he did he tried to show it by giving them toys and clothes. No, no, no, he never gave it to them, he gave it to Pauline to give to them. When they made five years old he gave them a BB gun to play with together. Aunt Ca’line said the moment they learned how
to shoot the gun, nobody and nothing was safe on the place. If they weren’t shooting at another child, they were shooting at a dog or a chicken. They put a hole in the back of Jobbo’s little girl’s neck, and Jobbo had to take the girl to the doctor and pay the doctor bill himself. They shot the mule that Charlie Jordan was riding and the mule threw Charlie in the ditch. While he was trying to get up, Billy and Willy kept on shooting at him. Charlie never did get back on the mule. He ran one way, the mule took off in the other direction.

Aunt Ca’line said the day after the children got the BB gun, she noticed that her number one rooster wasn’t walking straight. The rooster was acting like he was drunk. He didn’t know if he wanted to go left or right.

“What’s wrong with that crazy chicken?” Aunt Ca’line said. “Don’t tell me them two or three little hens out there done finally wored him down—Mr. Grant, catch that chicken for me,” she told Pa Bully.

Pa Bully sat on the bottom step, shelling corn and dropping it on the ground. All of the other chickens ran there to pick corn—all but the rooster. He staggered left, he staggered right; he went backward, he went forward. He looked like a child walking a rail and trying to keep his balance.

“Chip, chip, chip,” Pa Bully said.

Finally, the rooster staggered toward the steps. Pa Bully grabbed him under the wings.

“Both eyes gone,” he said. “Had to be shooting fast to get ’em both like that.”

Aunt Ca’line took the rooster to the other side to show Pauline what her children had done. Pauline and Bonbon were in the kitchen. Bonbon was standing by the window drinking coffee. Pauline sat at the table cutting okra.

“You see what them two little bastards done done my chicken?” Aunt Ca’line said to Pauline.

“Oh, Aunt Ca’line, I’m so sorry,” Pauline said. “That gun ain’t causing nothing but trouble,” she said to Bonbon. Bonbon sipped from his coffee but didn’t say anything. “I’ll pay for him,” Pauline said to Aunt Ca’line.

“Pay for him?” Aunt Ca’line said. “Pay for this rooster? This rooster do the work of five on this plantation, and you go’n pay for him? What you go’n do, give me five roosters?”