Such Sweet Thunder (15 page)

“Whew!” cried Miss Myrt.

“Don’ stop now, honey!” cried Miss Nettie, baring her rotting teeth with a smile. “I knowed you could do it all the time!”

“Show these young cake eaters what it’s all about!” shouted Mr. Harrison, throwing down a quarter that resounded upon the cobblestone with a tinkle.

The sweat rolled down Miss Myrt’s face, and gradually the coolness of the September evening chilled her body. She slowed down to a halt. The guitar man threw up his hat. “Give the lady a hand!” he shouted, and the alley rang with thunderous applause, which, seconds later, dispersed like windblown rain in all directions, amid joyous commentary upon her extraordinary performance.

Miss Nettie gave Mr. Geetar man a bottle of homebrew, while Tom Johnson, beaming with joy, took a ribbing from his momma.

“My momma, your gran’ma, boy, could dance a jig when she was seventy-four!”

“I believe her, too!” said Rutherford, as Miss Myrt’s voice faded into the background of general sound that washed against the stones and bricks of the houses and rushed into the myriad side channels of the alley, splashing against the porches and over the hearthstones into the houses, rising like the insistent waves of a great tide. “The ol’-timers! Them was
real
men —
an’
women, too, Jack!”

The sun was sinking. Sadly, his thoughts dwelling upon “the ol’timers,” he watched the guitar man sling his guitar across his back, whistle for his dog — who ran friskily behind him — and make his way up the alley.

The guitar man was almost at the top of the alley, almost past the row of stucco houses that faced the boulevard where he now paused for an instant, and then fused into the traffic where the dull glow of automobile headlights flashing in a deep rose sky slowly dissolving into an aura of blue.

Soon the light will come on, he thought with a pang of sadness,
thinking of bed and night and sleep and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until tomorrow when he would have to go to school.

The seven o’clock whistle blew! Viola shot a glance at him and he looked at her with a worried expression. She smiled tenderly at him.

Now? sure that she would send him to bed.

But then there was the whining sound of a screen door opening and the shuffle of chairs against the door downstairs. Gratefully he watched her attention being diverted by the two young white men who came out of the apartment downstairs on the south side. Pete, the short one with the slick black hair parted in the middle and the skinny nose, looked kind of like a possum. The other man was taller and better looking. He was wearing a Panama hat and a white shirt with a tie. Mr. Pete’s collar was open at the throat.

“You stay away from down there, Amerigo, you hear?” he heard Viola saying.

“I’ll keep a eye on ’im,” Mrs. Derby promised, “A bootleg joint ain’ no place for a baby!”

“I ain’ no baby neither,” he protested.

“Well, if you’d like to grow up to be a man,” Rutherford had declared vehemently, “you better stay away from that still like your momma told you, ’cause if I ever catch you down there, even
lookin’
in that door, I’m gonna do my best to
brain
you!”

“What’s a still?”

“It’s a kind a contraption for makin’ whiskey. You take mash an’ corn an’ …”

“You gonna teach ’im how to make it?” Viola exclaimed. “Go on out an’ play, boy.”

He went out on the porch and sat on the top step and peered down into the room from the banister railing. All he could see was a big table filled with whiskey bottles and a cardboard box full of new corks. Some of the bottles had funnels in them. Mr. Shorty and Mr. Pete poured something that looked like water into the bottles. Only the “water” didn’t smell like water. It had a strong, sort of sweet burning smell. He watched them fill the bottles one at a time, and when they were all full they poured some brown stuff in them until the strong water turned brown, and then they pushed the stoppers in.

After that they put the bottles in a big wooden box and nailed a top on it. Then, just as Mr. Shorty lifted the box in order to put it in the corner behind the door, he looked up and saw him watching them. He said something to Mr. Pete and then Mr. Pete said something to Mr.
Shorty in funny words that he couldn’t understand but sounded like the funny words that Mr. and Mrs. Crippa sometimes said, and Mr. Shorty had banged the door.

“Amerigo, set up here by me,” Viola was saying. He moved to the top step and sat by his mother. Meanwhile Mr. Pete looked up at Viola and smiled, at which she pulled her dress down over her knees, drew her legs well up under her body, and looked with a stony expression toward the top of the alley.

“Hi, Tony!” said Mr. Pete. He didn’t answer. Viola drew him closer to her. Then the screen door of the upper apartment of the Shieldses’ house opened and banged and Hazel and Margret Shields stepped out onto the porch and sat down.

Mr. Pete and his companion looked up on the porch and grinned. The two young women grinned back. Viola and Rutherford exchanged significant glances with Mrs. Derby and Unc Dewey. No one spoke. The child glanced up and down the alley; it was quiet, too.

The sun had disappeared. There was only a faint rose stain where it had been a few minutes ago. And now he suddenly was aware of a pulsing high-pitched chirping sound that, though familiar to him, he was not aware of having heard ten minutes earlier.

Crickets! He held his breath. The air was full of cricket-sound! Nervously, excitedly, he peered into the darkened windows of the empty house where the wild grasses pushed up through the ground floor and stuck out of the mound of ashes and cans in the cellar. The sound was loudest there. They’re in there! He looked at the sky, he looked at the trees, at the street lamp, and then he looked up toward the top of the alley.

Two figures appeared upon the very dim horizon, a man and a woman. They made their way slowly down the alley. The woman carried a basket on her left arm and linked her right arm in the left arm of the man. Every few yards she would halt and take something from her basket and toss it with a wide sweeping theatrical gesture to the left and to the right, bowing gracefully, touching her lips with the tips of her fingers and blowing kisses to the people on the porches.

Here and there someone sniggered, but not loudly, while most of the people looked on with a sort of respectful awe.

“Look!” he cried, as the woman stopped to greet the Johnsons, the Harrisons, Miss Nettie, Bra Mo, and Aunt Nancy, smiling gently upon the knot of giggling children sitting on the porch.

“Shut up!” cried Tom Johnson.

“We see,” said Viola thoughtfully, in a tone that checked the smile upon his face.

The streetlights came on, cutting globules of light into the cobblestones.

“Aunt Tish and Gloomy Gus!” Rutherford exclaimed.

As his father spoke he noticed that Mr. Pete, who had leaned his chair against the banister at the foot of the front steps, whispered something into his companion’s ear and laughed out loud. His companion did not laugh.

“But that ain’ his real name,” Rutherford was saying. “His real name is — do you remember what Pr’fessor Bowles said it was that time, Babe?”

“Naw, I don’,” said Viola, “Worthington? That ain’ it, but it was somethin’ like that. I think, anyway.”

“They ain’ quite right in the head, Amerigo,” said Rutherford softly. “I been seein’ ’um ever since I kin remember. But they’re nice people, though. They don’ bother
nobody
unless you bother them. Don’
never
fool with that old man! Naw sir!”

Gloomy Gus and Aunt Tish stepped into the lamplight. Just above the lamppost, diffusing a cool aura of perfectly round red, sharply impaled against the intense blue sky, stood the moon.

“An’ he’s always dressed proper, too!” Rutherford continued, “in that old hat, with a coat
an’
a tie an’ a vest to boot! You see that coat he’s wearin’?”

The child could see him quite plainly now. He looked at his baggy coat. It seemed to weigh him down.

“That’s his arsenel, Jack! Rocks! Big ’uns, Amerigo! Half bricks! He goes ’round like that to protect hisself. Jokers always jokin’ at ’im an’ pullin’ monkeyshines!”

He was looking at Aunt Tish. How did it feel not to be right in the head? Crazy? Her eyes shone darkly, brilliantly through a black lace veil that fell mysteriously over the wide brim of her tattered old black hat. At the base of the crown a large pale withered rose …

“I seen him throw a rock at a niggah once,” Rutherford continued, “from almost half a block away an’ lay his head wide open! An’ the jokers on the street wouldn’ let ’im bother ’im neither, ’cause he was right!”

Aunt Tish held her head high, proudly. Like somebody important. Amerigo thought hard of someone important with whom to compare her. Old Jake, but he’s a man. Maybe Aunt Rose? She wasn’t old enough. He thought of Miss Moore, of Grandma Veronica. He thought
of a queen. Her head high, poised upon a long slender neck that swept down to join her sloping shoulders, her nose thin and slightly arched with thin elongated nostrils, with thin lips, and a narrow chin coming to a point like a cat!

“They usta live down in Belvedere Holla,” Viola was saying, “in a ol’ tin shack patched up with cardboard. We usta pass by there every mornin’ on the way to school, me an’ your daddy, an’ T. C., an’ Ada, an’ Dee Dee, an’ Zoo — an’ a whole bunch of us. Rutherford an’ T. C. an’ the rest of them little ragamuffins usta throw rocks at the house an’ run!”

“Aw Babe!”

“Well, we did! An’ hide behind the trees an’ peep out to see what they’d do. An’ we all laughed to beat the band when they couldn’ catch us. We was just kids. We didn’ mean no real harm, I guess.”

And then somebody told Mr. Bowles, Amerigo thought involuntarily, his eyes fixed on the old woman.

“Somebody told Principal Bowles,” Viola was saying, and he was not surprised that he had known what she was going to say. “They had a assembly in the main auditorium that mornin’.”

“How’s it go?” said Rutherford softly, as though he were speaking to himself: “I want to tell you a story — that’s how he started! An’ man, he really told it, too, I’m tellin’ you! He had all ’um little niggahs cryin’ an’ red-eyed!”

“Once there was a beautiful young girl,” Viola was saying, “she was petite an’ quiet, an’ very intelligent an’ refined. But that didn’ mean she was stuck up. She could be a lot a fun. Most of all she liked to dance.”

“ ’Cause she was so smart she went to college,” Rutherford continued. “There she fell in love with a bright han’some young man. He fell in love with her, too. He was the smartest one in his class, the valedictorian, an’ ever’body said he was gonna be a great man. An’ so when they finished college they got married, an’ got a job teachin’ in the same school teachin’ school up north. They was from the South. He was a good-lookin’ man with fair skin an’ good hair — just like a white man. An’ ever’body loved ’um an’ respected ’um ’cause they wasn’ stuck up just ’cause they was smart an’ had a education. An’ they was happy, too.

“Then they had a baby, a boy, an’ a year after that they had a little baby girl, an’ they was proud enough to bust.

“One night, when the boy was five an’ the girl was four, they put ’um to bed an’ kissed ’um good night — just like I do you — an’ waited till
they was asleep. Then they went to a piana recital they was havin’ at Garrison School. It lasted till eleven o’clock.

“On the way home, just as they got near the house, they saw a big cloud a smoke floatin’ up into the sky. They got scaired ’cause they knew that the children was at home all by theirself, an’ they started runnin’ as fast as they could. When they got near the house they saw the fire wagon standin’ in front of the house. Big flames was leapin’ from the buildin’ into the sky. All the firemen was standin’ still, lookin’ up at the two top windows on the east side of the house. The mother an’ father looked up there, too. They saw the little boy, his name was — I never will forgit it as long as I live — Mike for Michael, an’ the girl’s name was Rosamond. They were trapped in the fire, an’ the fire was so hot that ever’body was scaired to git any closer. The firemen had to hold ’um back. They expected the walls to crumble down any minute. An’ they had to watch their children burn up in that fire — alive!

“They wasn’ never no more the same after that,” said Rutherford. “They got old. They forgot things all the time — to eat, to sleep. People usta see ’um runnin’ an’ hollerin’ through the streets at night. That was long ago, the old man said, kinda quiet-like, but that beautiful woman and handsome man are still alive and together. They live alone, in a old shack in Belevedere Holla. They live as good as they kin. They don’ do no harm to nobody. They talk to theyself a lot, an’ people think that ’cause they do that they crazy. The man has a sad an’ sometimes troubled look on his face, an’ he has to wear old worn-out clothes, that’s why the people nicknamed ’im Gloomy Gus. The woman’s called Aunt Tish ’cause she usta take scraps of colored tissue paper an’ make all kinds a flowers and ribbons an’ stick ’um in her hair.

“Children often throw rocks at ’um, but I suppose God’ll forgive ’um both, the young an’ the old people, ’cause they just don’ understand. Just like I’m sure that God’ll forgive Aunt Tish an’ Gloomy Gus for bein’ the devoted parents of Mike an’ Rosamond.”

All the while Rutherford had been speaking, Aunt Tish had been staring up at the streetlight.

“ ’Course, that ain’ exactly the way he told it,” said Rutherford, “but that’s the idea. He spoke a English that wouldn’ quit! Distinguished an’ c-l-e-a-r! An’ simple enough for kids to understand what he was talkin’ about. Takes a real educated man to do that!”

The old lady was still looking at the light.

She’s looking past it, Amerigo thought. She’s looking at the moon, at
the sky — through the sky! He followed her gaze and suddenly beheld with joyful surprise a thin yellow star.

A sparrow flitted off the roof of the empty house and settled on the telegraph wire. Distracted by its flight, Aunt Tish followed its sweeping movement, smiling all the while, and then, noticing the people on the porch, she extended her arms in a greeting. Her gaze rested upon his face for more than a minute.