Sanctuary (33 page)

W
hile on his way to Pensacola to visit his mother, Popeye was arrested in Birmingham for the murder of a policeman in a small Alabama town on June 17 of that year. He was arrested in August. It was on the night of June 17 that Temple had passed him sitting in the parked car beside the road house on the night when Red had been killed.

Each summer Popeye went to see his mother. She thought he was a night clerk in a Memphis hotel.

His mother was the daughter of a boarding house
keeper. His father had been a professional strike breaker hired by the street railway company to break a strike in 1900. His mother at that time was working in a department store downtown. For three nights she rode home on the car beside the motorman’s seat on which Popeye’s father rode. One night the strike breaker got off at her corner with her and walked to her home.

“Wont you get fired?” she said.

“By who?” the strike breaker said. They walked along together. He was well-dressed. “Them others would take me that quick. They know it, too.”

“Who would take you?”

“The strikers. I dont care a damn who is running the car, see. I’ll ride with one as soon as another. Sooner, if I could make this route every night at this time.”

She walked beside him. “You dont mean that,” she said.

“Sure I do.” He took her arm.

“I guess you’d just as soon be married to one as another, the same way.”

“Who told you that?” he said. “Have them bastards been talking about me?”

A month later she told him that they would have to be married.

“How do you mean, have to?” he said.

“I dont dare to tell them. I would have to go away. I dont dare.”

“Well, dont get upset. I’d just as lief. I have to pass here every night anyway.”

They were married. He would pass the corner at night. He would ring the foot-bell. Sometimes he would come
home. He would give her money. Her mother liked him; he would come roaring into the house at dinner time on Sunday, calling the other clients, even the old ones, by their first names. Then one day he didn’t come back; he didn’t ring the foot-bell when the trolley passed. The strike was over by then. She had a Christmas card from him; a picture, with a bell and an embossed wreath in gilt, from a Georgia town. It said: “The boys trying to fix it up here. But these folks awful slow. Will maybe move on until we strike a good town ha ha.” The word, strike, was underscored.

Three weeks after her marriage, she had begun to ail. She was pregnant then. She did not go to a doctor, because an old negro woman told her what was wrong. Popeye was born on the Christmas day on which the card was received. At first they thought he was blind. Then they found that he was not blind, though he did not learn to walk and talk until he was about four years old. In the mean time, the second husband of her mother, an undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich moustache, who pottered about the house; he fixed all the broken steps and leaky drains and such; left home one afternoon with a check signed in blank to pay a twelve dollar butcher’s bill. He never came back. He drew from the bank his wife’s fourteen hundred dollar savings account, and disappeared.

The daughter was still working downtown, while her mother tended the child. One afternoon one of the clients returned and found his room on fire. He put it out; a week later he found a smudge in his waste-basket. The grandmother was tending the child. She carried it about with her. One evening she was not in sight. The whole household
turned out. A neighbor turned in a fire alarm and the firemen found the grandmother in the attic, stamping out a fire in a handful of excelsior in the center of the floor, the child asleep in a discarded mattress nearby.

“Them bastards are trying to get him,” the old woman said. “They set the house on fire.” The next day, all the clients left.

The young woman quit her job. She stayed at home all the time. “You ought to get out and get some air,” the grandmother said.

“I get enough air,” the daughter said.

“You could go out and buy the groceries,” the mother said. “You could buy them cheaper.”

“We get them cheap enough.”

She would watch all the fires; she would not have a match in the house. She kept a few hidden behind a brick in the outside wall. Popeye was three years old then. He looked about one, though he could eat pretty well. A doctor had told his mother to feed him eggs cooked in olive oil. One afternoon the grocer’s boy, entering the area-way on a bicycle, skidded and fell. Something leaked from the package. “It aint eggs,” the boy said. “See?” It was a bottle of olive oil. “You ought to buy that oil in cans, anyway,” the boy said. “He cant tell no difference in it. I’ll bring you another one. And you want to have that gate fixed. Do you want I should break my neck on it?”

He had not returned by six oclock. It was summer. There was no fire, not a match in the house. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” the daughter said.

She left the house. The grandmother watched her disappear.
Then she wrapped the child up in a light blanket and left the house. The street was a side street, just off a main street where there were markets, where the rich people in limousines stopped on the way home to shop. When she reached the corner, a car was just drawing in to the curb. A woman got out and entered a store, leaving a negro driver behind the wheel. She went to the car.

“I want a half a dollar,” she said.

The negro looked at her. “A which?”

“A half a dollar. The boy busted the bottle.”

“Oh,” the negro said. He reached in his pocket. “How am I going to keep it straight, with you collecting out here? Did she send you for the money out here?”

“I want a half a dollar. He busted the bottle.”

“I reckon I better go in, then,” the negro said. “Seem like to me you folks would see that folks got what they buy, folks that been trading here long as we is.”

“It’s a half a dollar,” the woman said. He gave her a half dollar and entered the store. The woman watched him. Then she laid the child on the seat of the car, and followed the negro. It was a self-serve place, where the customers moved slowly along a railing in single file. The negro was next to the white woman who had left the car. The grandmother watched the woman pass back to the negro a loose handful of bottles of sauce and catsup. “That’ll be a dollar and a quarter,” she said. The negro gave her the money. She took it and passed them and crossed the room. There was a bottle of imported Italian olive oil, with a price tag. “I got twenty-eight cents more,” she said. She moved on, watching the price tags, until she found one that said twenty-eight
cents. It was seven bars of bath soap. With the two parcels she left the store. There was a policeman at the corner. “I’m out of matches,” she said.

The policeman dug into his pocket. “Why didn’t you buy some while you were there?” he said.

“I just forgot it. You know how it is, shopping with a child.”

“Where is the child?” the policeman said.

“I traded it in,” the woman said.

“You ought to be in vaudeville,” the policeman said. “How many matches do you want? I aint got but one or two.”

“Just one,” the woman said. “I never do light a fire with but one.”

“You ought to be in vaudeville,” the policeman said. “You’d bring down the house.”

“I am,” the woman said. “I bring down the house.”

“What house?” He looked at her. “The poor house?”

“I’ll bring it down,” the woman said. “You watch the papers tomorrow. I hope they get my name right.”

“What’s your name? Calvin Coolidge?”

“No, sir. That’s my boy.”

“Oh. That’s why you had so much trouble shopping, is it? You ought to be in vaudeville.… Will two matches be enough?”

They had had three alarms from that address, so they didn’t hurry. The first to arrive was the daughter. The door was locked, and when the firemen came and chopped it down, the house was already gutted. The grandmother was leaning out an upstairs window through which the smoke
already curled. “Them bastards,” she said. “They thought they would get him. But I told them I would show them. I told them so.”

The mother thought that Popeye had perished also. They held her, shrieking, while the shouting face of the grandmother vanished into the smoke, and the shell of the house caved in; that was where the woman and the policeman carrying the child, found her: a young woman with a wild face, her mouth open, looking at the child with a vague air, scouring her loose hair slowly upward from her temples with both hands. She never wholly recovered. What with the hard work and the lack of fresh air, diversion, and the disease, the legacy which her brief husband had left her, she was not in any condition to stand shock, and there were times when she still believed that the child had perished, even though she held it in her arms crooning above it.

Popeye might well have been dead. He had no hair at all until he was five years old, by which time he was already a kind of day pupil at an institution: an undersized, weak child with a stomach so delicate that the slightest deviation from a strict regimen fixed for him by the doctor would throw him into convulsions. “Alcohol would kill him like strychnine,” the doctor said. “And he will never be a man, properly speaking. With care, he will live some time longer. But he will never be any older than he is now.” He was talking to the woman who had found Popeye in her car that day when his grandmother burned the house down and at whose instigation Popeye was under the doctor’s care. She would fetch him to her home in afternoons and for holidays, where he would play by himself. She decided to have a
children’s party for him. She told him about it, bought him a new suit. When the afternoon of the party came and the guests began to arrive, Popeye could not be found. Finally a servant found a bathroom door locked. They called the child, but got no answer. They sent for a locksmith, but in the meantime the woman, frightened, had the door broken in with an axe. The bathroom was empty. The window was open. It gave onto a lower roof, from which a drain-pipe descended to the ground. But Popeye was gone. On the floor lay a wicker cage in which two lovebirds lived; beside it lay the birds themselves, and the bloody scissors with which he had cut them up alive.

Three months later, at the instigation of a neighbor of his mother, Popeye was arrested and sent to a home for incorrigible children. He had cut up a half-grown kitten the same way.

His mother was an invalid. The woman who had tried to befriend the child supported her, letting her do needlework and such. After Popeye was out—he was let out after five years, his behavior having been impeccable, as being cured—he would write to her two or three times a year, from Mobile and then New Orleans and then Memphis. Each summer he would return home to see her, prosperous, quiet, thin, black, and uncommunicative in his narrow black suits. He told her that his business was being night clerk in hotels; that, following his profession, he would move from town to town, as a doctor or a lawyer might.

While he was on his way home that summer they arrested him for killing a man in one town and at an hour when he was in another town killing somebody else—that
man who made money and had nothing he could do with it, spend it for, since he knew that alcohol would kill him like poison, who had no friends and had never known a woman and knew he could never—and he said, “For Christ’s sake,” looking about the cell in the jail of the town where the policeman had been killed, his free hand (the other was handcuffed to the officer who had brought him from Birmingham) finicking a cigarette from his coat.

“Let him send for his lawyer,” they said, “and get that off his chest. You want to wire?”

“Nah,” he said, his cold, soft eyes touching briefly the cot, the high small window, the grated door through which the light fell. They removed the handcuff; Popeye’s hand appeared to flick a small flame out of thin air. He lit the cigarette and snapped the match toward the door. “What do I want with a lawyer? I never was in—What’s the name of this dump?”

They told him. “You forgot, have you?”

“He wont forget it no more,” another said.

“Except he’ll remember his lawyer’s name by morning,” the first said.

They left him smoking on the cot. He heard doors clash. Now and then he heard voices from the other cells; somewhere down the corridor a negro was singing. Popeye lay on the cot, his feet crossed in small, gleaming black shoes. “For Christ’s sake,” he said.

The next morning the judge asked him if he wanted a lawyer.

“What for?” he said. “I told them last night I never was
here before in my life. I dont like your town well enough to bring a stranger here for nothing.”

The judge and the bailiff conferred aside.

“You’d better get your lawyer,” the judge said.

“All right,” Popeye said. He turned and spoke generally into the room: “Any of you ginneys want a one-day job?”

The judge rapped on the table. Popeye turned back, his tight shoulders lifted in a faint shrug, his hand moving toward the pocket where he carried his cigarettes. The judge appointed him counsel, a young man just out of law school.