Pay the Piper (25 page)

She thought that Hal's neediness and his dependency on her was heavy stuff. They gave her a sense of pride and worth as a woman. Her bosoms had even swelled with TLC. There were moments, as now, waiting for Mama, when Hal hovered, touching elbows, being near, that she never had with William and which made darker times with Hal more able to be endured.

Mama passed the beveled window and came around the curvature in the stairs. Her eyes were vanilla. Today they were neither crazed, dazed, nor glazed. She had been talking on the phone to her brother in Delton and gave the news. “Betsey's getting married,” she said about her niece. “At last! We're all so happy.” She took another step down. “And nobody cares he's a Jew,” she bawled.

“Now, now,” said Daddy.

Hal and Laurel smiled.

By day, Mama wore crepe dresses, smart pumps, and jewelry from matching sets according to some plan of her own. Soon after moving here, Laurel was invited to a party to meet Mama's friends. “Hal,” she reported back, “she scared the fire out of me. She drove straight through a four-way intersection without stopping while telling me how dangerous that corner was. When she couldn't maneuver into a parking space in front of the woman's house, she parked up on the sidewalk!”

Hal said one of the Negroes still left on the place was always supposed to drive her, Pepper. “Then why doesn't Daddy do something?” Laurel said. “He's never been able to control Mama,” Hal said. His own friends had told him while he was married to Sallie, he should have kept her pregnant all the time. What outrageous male thinking, Laurel thought, wondering if it was confined to the South. A man needed to be able to control something and preferably his wife, she knew that much. But Daddy had his son. Without even a job, living in a house his father owned, Hal had nothing in the world to control now but her, and helping him out, Laurel was quiet, dutiful and obedient, but these things naturally fit her nature.

She was still guilty about the day she drove to the party with Mama. She had looked over at her jewelry, and particularly at her necklace, saying, “That's beautiful. Is it jade?” Being bombed, and having a generous nature, maybe Mama would take it off and say, Yes, and you have it. But Mama only forded the curb, leaving her guilty about her ploy but peeved that it had failed. Already Mama had given her a string of polished pearls, just as Mrs. Perry gave her two strings from her family when she became her daughter-in-law. She wore the three strings together these days, asking her bedroom mirror, “How many strings of pearls from the families of other people will I have?”

Her parents individually had said they inherited not a damn thing. But her mother owned now an exquisite diamond ring and a fine diamond watch. “I never expected to have anything like these,” she had said humbly. Had she ever told that to the roughneck salesman who got them for her? In being the first to inherit these things, Laurel would start a new family line, and that seemed wondrous.

Out through the screen door stepped Hal and Daddy. Father and son, they went out. What a family group they seemed on this old and dreaming land. No matter that every decade or so Hal brought a different partner into the picture. When he confessed he could never go to a prostitute even with his buddies on hunting trips, she had said, “You don't stay married to anybody long enough to get bored.” Though she had thought, too, his refusal had something to do with his sincere, sweet nature.

In Connecticut, when Rick finally realized what was taking place in his household—that his mother was divorcing his father and marrying a prisoner who'd shot a boy to death and was moving to Mississippi—he had suddenly understood that Hal had been married twice. “Suppose he leaves you, Mom?” he had said. She had replied confidently Hal would never do that. If nothing else, he would have to have loyalty after her loyalty to him. Hal and Rick began finally to correspond:
I
may have a difficult time, Hal, adapting to my new situation next fall, with my mother moving off. I often wonder why my family situation can't be a normal one, but maybe it makes me a more complete person
.

Living alone with Rick, she one day found a strange substance when she was straightening his drawers. She sent a mite to Hal wrapped in aluminum foil.
Be careful opening this
, she wrote.
Is it what I think it is?

Great God, Laurel
, he replied through Buddy.
Yes. It's marijuana. Don't mail any more to me in this prison! About smoking pot, though, I don't know a damn thing. It was considered so terrible when I was coming along, I never saw any. Now marijuana seems as common as
—
well
—
as grass
. She was struck then by his humor, and her own naïveté. Divorced from William, she depended on Hal, locked up. She had not thought through a lot of things back then, and people had tried to tell her so.

Jubal in those days knocked a bottle of Beefeater's out of his doghouse. Rick's progress reports showed him to have a bad attitude in class. She had told him he had no right to act up because his parents were divorced. “Dad and I both had more screwed-up backgrounds than you've had,” she said. But there then stood the question between them: Is that why you're both so screwed up? After Rick skipped school one day, he charmed her out of punishment. He got up and sang and acted out all the Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, and Toto parts from
The Wizard of Oz. He affects me like you do, Hal
, she had said.
I
can't get mad at him
.

Savano got down off his tractor and started toward Daddy and Hal. Thinking about Rick, there was not a moment's cessation to the pain she felt about leaving him. Nothing here turned out to be worth it. Days were long. She could hardly bear the yellow school bus dropping off black children on the highway fronting Matagorda, or being at a new friend's house when her children came home. She thought back to that psychologist's advice: “Think of
numero uno,
” he had said. And he had been wrong.

Mama said softly beside her, “Laurel, the sky seems more blue when you and Hal are about.” How could she not love Mama? When her novel came out, Mama said it was the most touching love story she had ever read. Her own mother wanted to know why they had such a large, glaring picture of her on the back. Mama went on. “I hardly saw my son when he was married to Sallie. I hope out of all that's happened, Tina can know right from wrong and grow into a fine woman.”

“She's a sweet girl,” Laurel said. How could she have known it would be Tina who would tell her the truth: out of the mouths of babes? Hal had always written about her as his “toy child.” She had been in love back then with his use of diminutives. He wrote how he saved the “tiny plants” on Matagorda once, on a Saturday when there was no Negro help available and a storm was coming up. How could Daddy have said Hal didn't like farming? she thought back then. She started toward the porch too. On a hallway table sat a silver bowl brimming with Halloween candy. Mama had known no children would come out to Matagorda. She used to embarrass Tina, she had so much candy for just her and her friends, Hal said.

Laurel looked into the sunlight. Did the leaves here never change colors? Her last Halloween with Rick, a policeman brought him home merely because Rick was walking along a road alone. The young policeman said, “I recognize this house. It's where you've got a table made from a
ONE WAY DON
'
T ENTER
sign.”

“I bought that at the Fantasy Shop downtown,” Rick said.

“Not with
SOUNDPORT POLICE DEPARTMENT
on it, you didn't,” the young man said.

A man from Juvenile Court came and said Rick was in danger of being sent away to a detention home. She had jumped up, not afraid to be defensive for once. “Are you crazy? A boy like him doesn't go such places. You'd ruin him for life.” She said to Rick afterward, If they take you, there might be nothing Dad or I can do about it. She had been driving him to counseling sessions at Juvenile Court for years. “All those trips to South Norwalk. Aren't you getting anything out of them?” They drove there another day and stopped to buy a male mouse. “If you won't listen to me, listen to Dad.”

“Dad doesn't make decisions about me anymore.”

“Oh. Who does?”

“You do. I live with you now. Mom, sometimes will you talk baby talk to me so I will know I'm loved?”

She had been able only to nod her head. And to accept the task of being responsible for Rick, more than William was, for the first time. They had lived with other revealing moments. By her last fall in Connecticut an ordinance was passed against burning leaves. Rick stared at the piles they had raked and at the large green plastic bags. “What do we do now?” he said. “Get a teaspoon?”

“You're funny,” she had said. She bent her head toward the rake's end. “As funny as Dad,” she finished in a muffled voice.

“You hardly ever talk,” Rick said. “The house is so quiet. It's so quiet without Dad.”

“I never did talk,” she said. “You just never realized.”

Mama spoke in her gentle way. “I think Hal was an instrument of God's peace used for the good of his fellow men—through
Prison World
—to glue those broken lives together.”

She might have laughed, but she could not.

Mama said, “I had begun to look forward to those visiting Sundays as the highlights of my life.”

Laurel opened the screen door. What's it going to be like, Hal once asked, when we don't talk anymore about escapes and chases and people hurting one another, of fear and frustration and longing and despair? How could she have told him then, It will be boring. She missed the excitement they had lived through too; she had further dread of becoming like Mama in this place. She agreed. “Those were heady days.”

She had longed so always to be at that prison. She sat so wearily by herself in Connecticut. Hal had covered a Halloween party in First Offenders—costumes and all, he said.
I
think there are so many queers in that camp they use any excuse to impersonate females, even witches
. He had more fun than she did, she complained. William was dating someone his own age, she had said.

He says he can't make it with the twenty-year-old set. He says something called singles bars have sprung up in New York; two of his married friends went and got VD. Sad they would go, I thought. Or was William speaking of himself? Living your prison experience vicariously, I find myself becoming streetwise, the way you say, against your will, you're learning in prison how to scheme.

She wondered if reality ever matched dreams. It was not a question to turn and ask Mama. They were here on this place serving their own sentences. She could hear Savano's pants legs go
whiff
against each other. Daddy had spoken admiringly about him: “Once he didn't own anything but forty acres from one bayou to another one.” Now Savano owned a chunk of the Delta and rented out most of Matagorda. His own father was first-generation Italian here, a string bean farmer. He came to Matagorda bringing Mama young fig trees and planted them. He took off his hat and said, “Thank you for the opportunity you give my son.” Laurel had whistled “God Bless America” beneath her breath.

This is not good countryside for women. Where had she heard, There is a reality beneath the appearance of the world? The only way life here could be better was not to have known other places as she and Mama had, or had different husbands.

Hal had moved away from the men's conversation to the edge of the porch. His knees were too rounded and cute-looking in his tennis shorts. He looked like the Gingerbread Man in her old storybook; Run, run as fast as you. “Mister Mac.” Savano was talking. “That's dog-bog land. Rains and it's so slimy a dog can't walk on it.”

“I was waiting—” Daddy said.

“These trees should have—” and Savano was out of earshot after more conversation. He glanced toward the porch's far edge, where Hal escaped menfolks' talk, and muttered what was not supposed to be heard: “No more ambition than a lap puppy.”

Daddy looked toward the porch, smiling. “When I lift up my foot, I take my time about setting it down.”

Mama was tired and would go upstairs to play her Confederate records. The music often wandered out over the orchard, a thin lonesome sound like that of a penny whistle.
The spirit of the South reminds me of the spirit of the prison
, Mama had written.

Men who saw night coming down on them could somehow act as if they stood at the edge of dawn. Out of defeat they could still win something if nothing more—and it was everything—than a victory over the age-old impersonal foes of the human spirit. They were never quite licked because there can be something about human beings which in the last analysis is unconquerable. We all fight battles all our lives within ourselves, and to fight them as beautifully as our Confederate soldiers is a wonderful inheritance. So many men at the prison are like the Southern soldier the way they are fighting the battle.

She had never known whether these were Mama's own words or someone else's, but in Connecticut she had been driven more toward the family she would adopt.

She married not only heady days and this land but the South's whole history.

“Are you still going to your AA meetings, son?” Daddy said.

“I hate going there and standing up, saying, I'm an alcoholic.”

“Of course you can't do that, darling,” Mama cried. “You're not an alcoholic.”

12

In the old farmhouse, she felt cozy with the late winter storm outside, slashing against the windows, falling on the roof, springing up from tin rain gutters, falling down the bedroom chimney and into ashes, sending up their acrid scent, as if from all the fires that had ever been there. She stood at a window reaching from the floor almost to the ceiling. “‘That the small rain down may rain.'”