Stories of Erskine Caldwell (15 page)

She stopped crying and sat up more erectly, almost on her knees. He gazed at her wonderingly.

“I’m a nigger, Phil,” she said slowly. “I’m a nigger — a cooking, cleaning, washing nigger.”

“Shut up, Lavinia!” he said, shaking her until she was in pain. “Shut up, do you hear?”

“I am, and you know I am,” she cried. “I’m a nigger — a cooking, cleaning, washing nigger — just like all the rest are.”

She brushed the tears from her eyes and tried to look at him clearly in the half-light. She could see his deep, serious expression and she knew he meant every word he had said.

“You’ll get over it in a few days,” he told her. “Just wait awhile and see if everything doesn’t turn out just like I say it will.”

“You know what I am, though,” she said uncontrollably.

“Shut up, Lavinia!” he said, shaking her some more. “You’re not! You’re a white girl with colored blood — and little of that. Any of us might be like that. I have colored blood in me, for all I know. Even
she
might have some.”

He jerked his head toward the front of the house. Forgetting everything else momentarily, they both listened for a while. There was no sound whatever coming from that part of the building.

“She’ll order me around just like she would anybody else,” Lavinia said. “She’ll treat me like the blackest washwoman you ever saw. She’ll be as mean to me as she knows how, just to keep me in my place. She’ll even call me ‘nigger’ sometimes.”

“You’re just excited now,” he said. “It won’t be like that tomorrow. You know as well as I do that I don’t care what you are. Even if you looked like a colored girl, I wouldn’t care. But you don’t look like one — you look like a golden girl. That’s all there is to it. If she ever says anything different, just don’t pay any attention to her.”

“She’ll keep me in my place,” Lavinia said. “I don’t mind staying in my place, but I can’t live here and have her tell me about it a dozen times a day. I want to go. I am going.”

Phil got up, went to the door, and closed it. He came back and stood beside her.

“You’re going to stay here, Lavinia,” he said firmly. “If anybody goes, she’ll have to go. I mean that.”

Lavinia lay back on the pillow, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. She would rather have heard him say that than anything else he had said that night. She had been waiting five days and nights to hear him say it, and at last she could relax with the relief he had given her.

“I got married for a pretty good reason,” he told her, “but I’m not going to let it ruin everything. I thought you understood all about it before it happened. You even told me to go ahead and marry her, so it would put a stop to all the talk about you living here as my housekeeper. It was hurting business at the store. We had to do something like that. And now you say you are going to leave.”

There was silence for a long time after he had finished. Only the drone of the electric fan could be heard, and that for the first time sounded subdued.

“I won’t leave,” Lavinia said slowly, her voice so low he had to lean closer to her in order to hear. “The only way to make me leave is to throw me out. And I’d come back even if you did that. I want to stay, Phil.”

As she lay on her back, she felt herself dropping into unconsciousness. For a while she made no effort to keep herself awake. She lay with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips.

She knew nothing else until he got up from the side of the bed. She opened her eyes as wide as she could in order to see if he was still there.

“I’ve got to go now,” he said.

She sat up, shaking her head from side to side in the breeze of the electric fan. The air that blew through her hair was warm and clinging, and it began making her drowsy once more.

“Phil,” she asked, “will you tell me something before you go?”

“Sure,” he said, laughing. “What?”

“Phil, did you have a good time on your honeymoon?”

He laughed at her for a moment. After he had stopped there was a pause, and he laughed again.

“I had a great time on the beach,” he said hesitatingly.

She laughed at him then, with motions of her head, in her soft deep voice.

“And with that old-maid schoolteacher you married, too?” she said, her words trailing off into soft deep laughter that filled the room.

He did not answer her. He went to the door to open it, but for several moments he did not turn the knob. He turned back to look at her again, her laughter filling his ears.

After a while he jerked open the door, stepped out on the porch, and closed the door as quickly as he could. He waited there for a moment to find out if Hannah had heard the laughter in Lavinia’s room. When she did not come out into the hall after that length of time, he walked quickly down the porch to the hall door.

Lavinia’s laughter swam through the hot night air, pouring into his ears until he could not hear even the sound of his own footsteps. The soft deep notes followed him like a familiar sound that was so close to him he could not find its source.

(First published in
Esquire
)

I
DON’T KNOW
how the thing came about. It just happened that way. One moment I was standing beside her with my hand on her arm, and the next moment she was gone. A thing like that can be an occurrence, an event, a tragedy, or merely the final act of living, I don’t know what this was; but she was gone.

She had been standing beside me, her hands on the rail, looking out across the water. There was no mist in the air, and the stars were near and bright; but the lights on the shore seemed to be a long way off.

“They told me I could never see her again,” she said. “Then they shut the door and left me alone on the porch. I couldn’t stay there forever, I left.”

But there is no sense in my trying to repeat what she said. I can’t remember everything, and most of it was unspoken. She had not even started at the beginning. The first words she said were: “I was nineteen when the baby was born.” And when she spoke again, it was about something else. It would be foolish for me to try to arrange her sentences in any kind of order, and it would be impossible. Even if it were possible to take the words she uttered that night and arrange them in some kind of order, the things would have no meaning. A thousand things could be made of the words and sentences, but there is no one who knows what the logical sequence should be. In the end, we could with just as much purpose shake several thousand words in a hat and put them together in the order in which they were drawn.

I am not trying to repeat the things she said. It would be impossible to do that. I did not even try to hear much of what was being said, and most of what I did hear was all but inaudible.

“The house they live in has two stories and an attic. The roof has been covered with tin painted red. In the yard are three elm trees.”

I heard her say that, but put those sentences after “I was nineteen when the baby was born,” and almost everyone would suppose that she had given birth to a child in a house with two stories and a tin roof painted red. And that in the yard were elm trees. But that is not true, because the baby was born in a hospital. That’s why I am not going to repeat what she said, at least not much of it. Some would be inclined to believe one thing, and some another. But the fact is that nothing someone else would be inclined to believe is true. What actually happened was that she said several things to me and stood beside me at the rail. That’s why I don’t know how the thing came about.

She had told me everything there was to tell. That was all she wished to talk about. The baby had been taken away from her, and her husband had left her. “I have never been dishonest with him,” she had said. “But he was tired of me, and he wanted to live with someone else. That was all right, if he wished to do that. I loved him, but if he wanted to go, I did not wish to make him stay. I really wanted him to go and be happy. But they had no right to take the baby. She was mine. I am her mother.” I am not going to tell a lie about this thing. A lie is told with words, and the words in this have nothing whatever to do with what I am telling.

The proper thing for me to have done was to offer to help her in some way, and to promise her that I would try to raise some money for a lawyer to take the matter to court. Or this or that. But I made no offer. I merely stood and looked at her, and waited to see what was going to happen next. “The baby is mine,” she said. “She is mine! I am her mother, and I have not been dishonest with him.”

People were strolling past us, laughing and talking. There were three hundred people behind us.

“I’ll never see the baby again. She will never see me. They will teach her that someone else is her mother. But she is my baby, and I’m her mother.”

There is no reason why I should pretend not to be sentient about this. I have heard women many times before talk about their children, about their lovers, about nearly everything under the sun that women live for. And yet, in a case like this, when a woman says, “He begged me to marry him so we could live together and have a baby,” I never know what to say or to think. Usually I stand and look at her and wonder how such things happen. That was what she had said: “He begged me to marry him.”

“This other woman he fell in love with made him happier than I could. If I had known, I would have given him everything she did.”

We were not at the rail then. We were in her cabin eating some sandwiches she had brought with her, and drinking coffee. Oh, the whole thing was mixed up. Nothing took place in logical order, and nothing had been said one moment that had any bearing on what was said the moment before. The whole thing was a hopeless cutout puzzle with an unknown number of parts missing. It would never come out in a way that made sense. I knew that. I knew that even when the whole thing was over, when the puzzle was finished except for the missing pieces, it would be unrecognizable. Neither I nor anyone else would know how the whole should appear.

She was on her way back home. At any rate, it had been her destination. But when she got there, there was nothing she could have done. She had no money for rent and food and clothes. She did not even know where she could find a job. When she reached home, she would have been forced to walk from house to house asking for something to eat and for some work to do. If she had had her baby, she could have undertaken to do that. But alone, with no family to help her, and with nothing left to live for, it would have been more than she could have endured. There is a breaking point. There is a place which is the end. After that, going back is the only way left. She could not go back. They had shut the door in her face, and had told her not to come there again.

“I don’t care what happens to me,” she said. “Nothing matters now. I want to forget everything for a few moments. If I could only be happy for a little while, I would be satisfied. I have never talked like this before, because this is the first time in my life I have ever thought of such things. I have always been honest with my husband. I did not deceive him. I have never been unfaithful. I have not even wished to be. I have never done anything that I knew he did not like for me to do. Now, I don’t care what happens. I only want to be happy for a few short minutes. Perhaps I could get some liquor and drink until I am senseless. But that’s foolish. I couldn’t be happy that way. I would only be asleep. I want to feel happy, and to know that I am.”

I’m not going to lie about this thing. I could make the whole thing a lie, perhaps, by pretending that I tried this way and that to comfort her. Perhaps I might have told her that if she stopped thinking about it so much and went to sleep that everything would be all right the next day. But I said nothing like that. I did nothing of the kind. I put the empty cups on the floor, in the corner of the cabin so the roll and pitch of the ship wouldn’t upset them, and at the same time looked at her while she tried to talk.

“This woman he loved drank a certain kind of liquor with him and then they lay down together. My love was stronger than anything like that can be. I would have gladly torn myself open for him.”

When she first began talking like that, I didn’t know what to do. She had given up all hope of ever seeing either her husband or her baby again, and she knew that what happened after that night would not concern her. And she knew there was a way to forget and to feel happy, even if it was so short in time. She must have known that when she began telling me that she wished to forget for a few moments.

“He used to come home, after being away for two or three weeks, and tell me to leave him alone. He never knew how much he hurt me, but I could stand it because I had my baby then. But there were times when I wanted him so much. No one will ever know how I loved him. I loved him and my baby more than my own life.”

What could I have said? What could a man, accustomed to doing the things he wished to do, say to a woman who had told him that? How could I understand what she was talking about? How can a man know how a woman feels when she is forced to live mute and alone?

Oh, the whole thing was a jumble. It was the framework of an image, indistinct and unbelievable. When she asked me what time it was, she knew and I knew that time did not matter. Time had nothing to do with who we were, what we were doing, and what we were talking about. The face of a clock is merely the reminder of the past. One o’clock, ten o’clock or five, it would still have been time for her to go in and see if the baby had tossed off the cover and to tuck her in for the night.

But why did my hands tremble, and why did my heart quiver? This thing was real. There she was, sitting before me, crying this moment and laughing the next. She had a wedding ring on her finger. The woodwork creaked under the stress and strain of the sea and the engines. It was real. I could feel it with my hands. I could touch it, scratch it, mar it with the nails in my shoes.

“I went down to the dock and bought a ticket. I had to wait nearly half an hour because there was such a crowd ahead of me. It took a long time for me to get aboard.”

How did all this happen? How did it come about that I, who had never seen her before and who would never see her again, went with her and sat down in front of her? There were other things to do. This was not the only cabin on the ship. She was not the only person. It would be so easy to tell what might have happened, rather than to tell what actually did. It would be easier than doing this.