Stories of Erskine Caldwell (55 page)

A bead of glistening brown pitch fell from the ceiling to the toe of Miss McAllister’s right shoe, missing the tip of her nose by a hair’s breadth and dropping between the hollow of her breasts. Somebody was coming up the squeaky stairs.

Arlene was about to whisper something to me when the door opened and Doctor Anderson came in. He paused a moment to look at us. He smiled at Arlene, waved his hand at me, and then turned to Miss McAllister. She closed the door, bolted it with the thumb lock, and took Doctor Anderson’s hat and hung it on the tree behind her. They walked into the next room, side by side, talking to each other.

Doctor Anderson wet his finger on his tongue and tapped the top of the stove with it. We could hear the sizzle in the room where we were.

“I like your regulation blouse,” Doctor Anderson said. “At the next meeting of the board, I’m going to propose that we adopt your style of uniform for all the nurses at the hospital.”

Miss McAllister unbuttoned his vest and helped him with his long white coat.

“I forgot to bring the other one with me today,” she said. “I was in such a rush all morning that I didn’t have time to look for a regulation blouse.”

“How did you feel this morning? All right?”

“I had a little wobble in my walk for an hour or so. When I first got up, I felt like I was walking on stilts.”

“My wife asked me what kind of case I had last night. I told her it was an emergency call.”

There was a quick step, a moment’s silence, and an almost inaudible sucking of lips.

Doctor Anderson stepped into the doorway.

“All right, Miss —” he said. “We’re ready now.”

Arlene turned her face from him and buried her head against me.

“I’m afraid, honey,” she whispered. “I’m so afraid.”

I could not release her, and after a while Doctor Anderson came over and pulled us apart. He said something to Miss McAllister that I did not hear.

“Kiss me just once more, honey, and I’ll not be afraid to go,” Arlene said, holding her lips up to mine. “I’ll not be afraid to go.”

Doctor Anderson stepped back a moment. He waited for several minutes, fingering his stethoscope.

“All right, Miss —” he said. “We’re ready now.”

“I’m not afraid any longer,” Arlene said, standing.

Doctor Anderson took her by the arm and led her into the next room. I saw them enter the kitchen and I could hear Miss McAllister shaking down the ashes in the red-hot cookstove for the fourth time. It was so hot by then that the air in both rooms smelled scorched.

After a few minutes, Doctor Anderson came to the door. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows and his face and hands were so inflamed by the heat in the kitchen that the skin looked as though it had been smeared with blood.

He beckoned to me.

“You may come in for just a moment, Mr.—” he said. “But please do not touch anything on the table with your hands or body.”

He stepped back and I walked unsteadily into the room with them. Miss McAllister had opened a can of ether, and the odor had already permeated the air. It made me a little sick to smell it, even though the odor was still faint.

“I’m not afraid at all now,” Arlene said, smiling up at me from the white oilcloth on the table top. “Kiss me just once more, and I’ll be all right, honey.”

Miss McAllister stepped over to the table and drew the sheet over Arlene, folding back the hem at her throat. When she turned to go, she looked at the three of us through tight lips.

Doctor Anderson stepped over to the table and drew the sheet from Arlene, jerking it off in a single motion, and throwing it on a chair beside the cookstove. He came back and stood on the other side of the table looking down at Arlene.

I kissed her until Doctor Anderson laid his hand on my back and pulled me away from her. Her face was bloodless.

“That will be too much excitement for the patient, Mr.—” he said, pushing me away.

Miss McAllister was standing impatiently beside me with the ether cone in her hands. She caught Doctor Anderson’s eyes and nodded her head in the direction of the door. He turned me around and pushed me towards the other room.

When I looked back at Arlene and saw her for the last time, she raised her head just a little and said something. I stopped and waited until she could repeat what I had not heard.

“Please call up Mamma,” she said, smiling, “and tell her I’ll not be home tonight.”

“I will, Arlene,” I promised, starting back into the room where she lay. “I’ll do anything in the world for you, Arlene.”

Miss McAllister tapped her foot impatiently while she waited for Doctor Anderson to send me out.

“That’s sweet of you to say that, honey — and don’t forget to call up Mamma and tell her I’ll not be home tonight. And — honey, if — if I never see you again — you will always love me, won’t you — you’ll always remember me, won’t you?”

Before I could run to her, Doctor Anderson had grabbed me by the arms and had pushed me into the next room. Miss McAllister ran and shut the door between us, bolting it with the thumb lock. Already the sickening odor of ether had entered that room, and I ran to the other door and down the stairs for fresh air.

On the front porch the old man was still sitting there smoking his pipe. The tobacco had burned out, but he puffed on the stem just as though it were lit. He glanced up when I ran out on the porch, and looked at me over the rim of his spectacles.

“I can’t remember that I’ve ever seen your face before, son,” he said, squinting at me. “When did you move in?”

My head was swimming and I could not understand anything he was saying. I leaned against the rooms-for-rent sign on the wall, closing my eyes as I felt myself slide slowly downward to the porch floor.

(First published in
Contact
)

N
EVER MIND WHAT
put Claude Barker up to getting married. Nearly everybody does something like that sometime or other. They’ll be going along minding their own business for months at a time, and then all at once they come across a girl that sort of — well, never mind about that, either.

If it had been anybody else than Claude, nobody would have thought much about it. He was one of the bunch that had been hanging around town, mostly at the poolroom, doing nothing most of the time, for five or six years, maybe ten or twelve. Claude said he was waiting for a job at the filling station, but everybody else who wasn’t working said that, too.

Jack and Crip were sitting in the sun in front of the filling station when Claude went by the first time. That was about ten o’clock that morning, and Claude was on his way to the courthouse to get a license.

“What’s Claude up to?” Crip said.

The car Claude had borrowed early that morning from Jack sounded as if it would never make the trip to the courthouse and back.

“Search me,” Jack said. “Maybe he thinks he knows where he can find a job.”

“Yeah,” Crip said, spitting. “But whoever would have thought of borrowing a car to run away from it? If a job ever hears of Claude, it’ll wish it hadn’t by the time it catches up with him. He’d turn around and fan its tail all the way from here to Atlanta and back again. His old man . . .”

Claude’s old man, sitting on the bench in front of the post office, said he thought he knew why Claude had suddenly taken it into his head to get married. Everybody was waiting for the cotton-gin whistle to blow so he could go home to dinner. Claude had been to the courthouse and back, and somebody had seen him drive out to the preacher’s house on the edge of town half an hour before.

Claude’s old man said he reckoned he knew why Claude was getting married. “By God, it wouldn’t pain a man much to make a guess like that,” somebody said. “No, but it would be a hell of a come-off if there were no more girls like Willeen Howard left in the country.” “That ain’t no lie,” somebody else said. “When that time comes, I’ll be ready to turn the country over to the niggers and boll weevils and screw-worms and sell out from here.”

The ginnery whistle down the railroad tracks blew for the twelve-thirty layoff. Claude’s old man stood up to go home to see what his wife had cooked up for dinner.

“I’ll tell you people what put the marrying bug on Claude. The boy is young yet, and he wasn’t used to fooling around with white girls. He’s been of the habit . . .”

The crowd broke up like a rotten egg hitting the side of a barn. “Claude’s been in the habit . . .”

Old man Barker didn’t have time to finish. He had to hurry home and eat his meal before his wife let the victuals get cold.

Downtown at the noon hour was quiet except for a handful of Negroes from the country who were sitting on the shaded railroad-station platform eating rat-trap cheese and soda crackers. Occasionally an automobile would plow through town on its way to Atlanta or Savannah, leaving the air tasting like ant poison for half an hour afterward.

Claude and Willeen came rattling down the street, across the square, Jack’s old car hitting the railroad irons with a sound like a brick running through a cotton gin. Claude drove up to the filling station and stopped. Crip woke up and ran out to see who it was. Claude had lifted he seat and was unscrewing the gas-tank cap.

“Boy, you need lots of gas today,” Crip said, putting the nozzle into he tank and looking at Willeen at the same time.

“Give me two gallons,” Claude said.

“What you two going to do now?” Crip asked, turning the pump rank.

“That ain’t no lie,” Claude said, winking at Willeen.

Crip hung up the hose while Claude was counting out the change for the gasoline. He took a quick look into the back seat to see if Claude and Willeen had any baggage for a trip. There was not a thing. He looked again to be sure.

Crip did not have time to do any more looking around, because he had to have one more look at Willeen before Claude drove off with her. It was too late then to ask her why she had not told him something about it. If he had known about it in time, he could have asked her himself. It would not have been any trouble for him to get married. He could have done it just as easily as Claude did. But, God Almighty, what a funny feeling Willeen gave you when you looked at her real hard. It made you feel as if you were eating a clingstone peach and had got down almost to the last of it, and the more you sucked it, and bit the stone, the better the peach tasted, and you began to feel sort of hoggish but didn’t give a damn how you acted when you couldn’t get enough of it.

Willeen got back into the front seat and sat down. Claude grabbed up the water bucket and began filling the radiator.

It would have been easy enough to have married her, if you had only thought about it before Claude did. You’d make a monkey of yourself, all over the place, any day of the week, for some of that. By that time your eyes felt dry and stuck in your head when you had blinked them for so long, and when you shut them for a moment to get them moistened, you were ready to start all over again. After that you couldn’t help seeing all the pretty things she had and you forgot all about tending the filling station and got to thinking that maybe I could fix it up someway or other. It wasn’t so long ago that Willeen told you you could throw her down if you wanted to. You were a damn fool not to do it when she gave you the chance. But that wasn’t now by a long shot. They drove off down the street leaving Crip standing there looking like a cow mired in quicksand.

Claude drove around the square seven or eight times, warming up the engine, and finally stopped in front of the poolroom. It made him itch all over when he thought of having a cue stick in his hands. There was no reason why he should not take time to shoot a couple of games. He might be able to win half a dollar, and then he could buy another couple gallons of gas. They could ride twice as far if they had two more. It was time for the one-thirty ginnery whistle to blow, and people were already on their way back from dinner. A game was just starting when Claude went inside, and he grabbed a cue stick from the rack and got in. They played five rounds of three-handed straight, and Claude came out even, after all.

Somebody in the street was blowing an automobile horn. Upton Daniels came in, and Claude started a two-handed game of rotation with him. Claude broke, and made the seven and the fifteen ball.

“Boy, what a shot!” he said. “I wouldn’t take dollars for this stick of mine. There’s never been one like it before.”

Upton made a face by pushing out his mouth.

“You ought to have seen me ring them in last night,” said Claude. “Seven and eleven were pay balls, and I rang them in nine games in a row. It takes a good man to do that.”

“Pig’s butt,” Upton said.

Upton shot and missed an easy one. He banged his cue stick on the floor and made another face with his mouth.

Claude ran in three balls, missed the fourth, but Upton was left sewn up behind the fourteen. Upton jerked up his cue and scattered the balls with the heavy end.

“That gives a man away every time,” Claude said, chalking his cue tip. “The first thing I learned about shooting pool was to keep my head. That’s why I’m the best shot in town. If you was as good as I am, you could make yourself a little money now and then off the drummers who come to town. I know you’ve made runs of thirty-seven and thirty-eight every once in a while, but that was just luck.”

“Pig’s butt,” Upton said.

The horn out in the street started blowing again. When they finished the game, Claude went out to the front of the poolroom and looked into the street to see who was making so much racket. He had missed a couple of easy shots just on that account.

When he saw Willeen sitting in the car, he shoved his cue stick at Upton and ran outside. Willeen looked angry.

“God Almighty,” Claude said under his breath, getting into the car and driving off.

It was about five o’clock in the afternoon then, and there were only two gallons of gasoline in the tank. Ten miles out of town, Claude turned around and came back. When they reached his house, it was time for supper.

“I’ll go inside and fix things up first,” he told Willeen. “It won’t take long.”

He got out and started up the steps. Willeen called him back, and he went to the car.