Tar Baby (27 page)

“He was probably too ashamed.”

“Oh, God.”

“I think he is still ashamed.”

Valerian’s hands were shuddering again. “Why does he love you?” he asked her over his shuddering fingers. “Why does he love
you?”

“Because I love him.”

Valerian shook his head and asked her a third time, “Why does he love you?”

“He knows I love him,” she said, “that I couldn’t help it.”

Valerian shouted then, at the top of his throat, “Why does he love you?”

Margaret closed her blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes. “I don’t know.”

Now the tears came. Not all at once. Not in the rush of blood he anticipated, longed for; rather a twilight glimmer, a little mercury in the eyes that grew brighter and brighter. That was the beginning and he knew there would be more of them. For now he would settle for this bright burning.

Margaret opened her eyes and looked into his. “Hit me,” she said softly. “Hit me, Valerian.”

His shuddering fingers went wild at the thought of touching her, making physical contact with that skin. His whole body recoiled. “No,” he said. “No.”

“Please. Please.”

“No”

“You have to. Please, you have to.”

Now he could see the lines, the ones the make-up had shielded brilliantly. A thread here and there and the roots of her hair were markedly different from the rest. She looked real. Not like a piece of Valerian candy, but like a person on a bus, already formed, fleshed, thick with a life which is not yours and not accessible to you.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

Every day she asked him, every day he answered, “Tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow.” But he never did and she was hard-pressed to think of a way to ease their mutual sorrow.

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of the year, Margaret pushed open the kitchen door. Ondine was there as she always was; the braids Margaret had snatched were folded quietly now across her head. Margaret, having had the dream she ought to, felt clean, weightless as she walked through the doors and stood at the oak table. Ondine was napping, her head resting on the back of a chair, her feet resting on another. When she heard the grunt of the door hinges, she woke at once and stood up, alert.

“No, no. Sit back down, Ondine.”

Ondine shoved her feet into her moccasins and continued to stand. “Can I get you something?” she asked out of habit and out of a need to do what was wanted of her and get the woman out of the kitchen.

“No. No, thank you.” Margaret sat down and did not seem disturbed by the painful silence Ondine was keeping after the refusal. She looked past the black woman’s silhouette to a place in the shutters where the sky showed through.

“I knew you knew,” she said. “I always knew you knew.”

Ondine sat down without answering.

“You loved my son, didn’t you?” It was more a statement than a question.

“I love anything small that needs it,” said Ondine.

“I suppose I should thank you for not saying anything, but I have to tell you that it would have been better, Ondine, if you had. It’s terrible living in the same house with your own witness. But I think I understand it. You wanted me to hate you, didn’t you? That’s why you never said anything all those years. You wanted me to hate you.”

“No, I didn’t. You…you wasn’t a whole lot on my mind.”

“Oh, yes I was, and you felt good hating me, didn’t you? I could be the mean white lady and you could be the good colored one. Did that make it easier for you?”

Ondine did not answer.

“Anyway, I came in here to tell you that I’m sorry.”

Ondine sighed. “Me too.”

“We could have been friends, Ondine. Like at first when I used to come in your kitchen and eat your food and we laughed all the time. Didn’t we, Ondine? Didn’t we use to laugh and laugh. Didn’t we? I have it right, don’t I?”

“You got it right.”

“But you wanted to hate me, so you didn’t tell.”

“There was nobody to tell. It was woman stuff. I couldn’t tell your husband and I couldn’t tell mine.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I mean why didn’t you scream at me, stop me, something. You knew and you never said a word.”

“I guess I thought you would let us go. If I told Sydney he might tell Mr. Street and then we’d be out of a job—a good job. I don’t know now what I thought, to tell the truth. But once I started keeping it—then it was like my secret too. Sometimes I thought if you all let me go there won’t be anyone around to take the edge off it. I didn’t want to leave him there, all by himself.”

“You should have stopped me.”

“You should have stopped yourself.”

“I did. I did stop myself after a while, but you could have stopped me right away, Ondine.”

Ondine put the heels of her hands on her eyelids. When she removed them, her eyes were red. She blew out a breath and she was old. “Is that my job too? To stop you?”

“No. It’s not your job, Ondine. But I wish it had been your duty. I wish you had liked me enough to help me. I was only nineteen. You were—what—thirty? Thirty-five?”

Ondine tilted her head and looked at her employer sideways. She raised her eyebrows slowly and then squinted. It was as though she saw Margaret for the first time. She shook her head back and forth back and forth in wonder. “No,” she said. “I wasn’t thirty-five. I was twenty-three. A girl. Just like you.”

Margaret put her forehead into her palm. The roots of her sunset hair were brown. She held her head that way for a moment and said, “You have to forgive me for that, Ondine. You have to.”

“You forgive you. Don’t ask for more.”

“You know what, Ondine? You know what? I want to be a wonderful, wonderful old lady.” Margaret laughed a rusty little bark that came from a place seldom used. “Ondine? Let’s be wonderful old ladies. You and me.”

“Huh,” said Ondine, but she smiled a little.

“We’re both childless now, Ondine. And we’re both stuck here. We should be friends. It’s not too late.”

Ondine looked out of the window and did not answer.

“Is it too late, Ondine?”

“Almost,” she said. “Almost.”

A
T SOME POINT
in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens—that letting go—you let go because you can. The world will always be there—while you sleep it will be there—when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there is reason to wake. A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that. So the windows of the greenhouse can be opened and the weather let in. The latch on the door can be left unhooked, the muslin removed, for the soldier ants are beautiful too and whatever they do will be part of it.

Valerian began going back to his greenhouse. Not as early as before; now he waited until after the breakfast rain. He was still telling Margaret, “Tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow.” But he did not change anything in there. Didn’t sow or clip or transpose. Things grew or died where and how they pleased. Isle des Chevaliers filled in the spaces that had been the island’s to begin with.

He thought about innocence there in his greenhouse and knew that he was guilty of it because he had lived with a woman who had made something kneel down in him the first time he saw her, but about whom he knew nothing; had watched his son grow and talk but also about whom he had known nothing. And there was something so foul in that, something in the crime of innocence so revolting it paralyzed him. He had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know. He was satisfied with what he did know. Knowing more was inconvenient and frightening. Like a bucket of water with no bottom. If you know how to tread, bottomlessness need not concern you. Margaret knew the bottomlessness—she had looked at it, dived in it and pulled herself out—obviously tougher than he. What an awful thing she had done. And how much more awful not to have known it. Which was all he could say in his defense: that he did not know; that the postman passed him by. Perhaps that was why he had never received the message he’d been waiting for: his innocence made him unworthy of it. The instinct of kings was always to slay the messenger, and they were right. A real messenger, a worthy one, is corrupted by the message he brings. And if he is noble he should accept that corruption. Valerian had received no message, but after waiting so long, to receive, know and deliver its contents, imperceptibly he had made it up. Made up the information he was waiting for. Preoccupied himself with the construction of the world and its inhabitants according to this imagined message. But had chosen not to know the real message that his son had mailed to him from underneath the sink. And all he could say was that he did not know. He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

9

“T
HIS IS
a town?” Jadine shouted. “It looks like a block. A city block. In Queens.”

“Hush up,” he said squeezing her waist. “This is not only a town, it’s the county seat. We call it the city.”

“This is Eloe?”

“No. This is Poncie. Eloe is a little town. We got fourteen miles to go yet.”

Now she understood why he wanted to rent a car and drive to Florida. There was no way to fly to Eloe. They had to go to Tallahassee or Pensacola, then get a bus or train to Poncie,
then
bum a ride to Eloe for no buses went out there, and as for taxis—well, he doubted if either one would take them. Bumming a ride didn’t seem to be a problem in his mind. Her luggage held all he had and when they got off the bus she saw eight or ten black men lounging there in front of the depot, as Son called it. Son talked to one of them for at least five minutes. They waited another thirty minutes at the candy machine until a black man named Carl appeared driving a four-door Plymouth.

He drove them to Eloe asking pointed questions all the way. Son said he was an army buddy of a man named Soldier—that they were out of Brewton on their way to Gainesville. Thought he’d look in on old Soldier, he said. Carl said he knew of Soldier but had never met him. He had never seen a cashmere sweater with a cowl neckline, or Chacrel boots, and didn’t know they could make jeans that tight or if they did who but a child would wear them since no honest work could be done in them. So he looked in the rear-view mirror with disbelief. Nobody dressed like that in Brewton, Alabama, and he suspected they didn’t in Montgomery either.

He followed Son’s directions and dropped them off in front of a house Jadine supposed was in Eloe since Son paid the man and got out.

“Where are the ninety houses? I see four,” asked Jadine, looking around.

“They’re here.”

“Where?”

“Spread out. Folks don’t live all crunched up together in Eloe. Come on, girl.” He picked up the luggage and, grinning like a groom, led her up the steps. A frame door was open to the still March morning. They both stood in front of a screen door through which they could see a man sitting at a table with his back to them. Son didn’t knock or move, he simply looked at the back of the man’s head. Slowly the man turned his head and stared at them. Then he got up from the table. Son opened the screen door and stepped in with Jadine just behind him. He didn’t move closer to the man; he just stopped and smiled. The man did not speak and did not smile; he kept on staring. Then he raised his hands, clenching them into fists, and began to jump up and down on both feet, stamping the floor like a kid jumping rope. Son was laughing soundlessly. A woman ran in, but the man kept on jumping—pounding the floor. The woman looked at Son and Jadine with a little confused smile. The man jumped higher and faster. Son kept watching and laughing. The man was still jumping rope, but not smiling or laughing as Son was. Finally when the stamping shook a lamp to the table’s edge and a window banged down, and the children were peering in the doorway, the man shouted at the top of his lungs Son! Son! Son! to the beat of his crazy feet, and kept on until Son grabbed his head and pressed it into his chest. “It’s me, Soldier. It’s me.”

Soldier wrenched away, looked him in the face, then ran to the back window. “Wahoo! Wahoo!” he shouted, and came back to march four-step around the room. Two men came to the front door and looked in at the marcher and then at the visitors.

“Soldier’s clownin,” said the woman.

“Soldier’s clownin,” said the children.

“Good God a’ mighty, that’s Son,” whispered one of the men. And then it stopped. Son and Soldier hit each other on the head, the hands, the shoulders.

“Who bought you them skinny shoes?”

“Where’s your hair, nigger?”

H
E ASKED HER
if she would mind staying at Soldier’s house with his wife, Ellen, while he went to see his father. Jadine demurred; she had run out of conversation with Ellen ten minutes after it started, but Son urged her, saying he had not seen Old Man in eight years and that he didn’t want to bring someone his father didn’t know into his house the first time they met in all that time. Could she understand that? She said yes, out in Soldier’s yard near the mimosa, but she didn’t understand at all, no more than she understood the language he was using when he talked to Soldier and Drake and Ellen and the others who stopped by; no more than she could understand (or accept) her being shunted off with Ellen and the children while the men grouped on the porch and, after a greeting, ignored her; or why he seemed so shocked and grateful at the same time by news that some woman named Brown, Sarah or Sally or Sadie—from the way they pronounced it she couldn’t tell—was dead. But she agreed. God. Eloe.

He left her there and walked alone to the house he was born in. The yellow brick front looked tiny. It had seemed so large and sturdy compared to the Sutterfield shack he and Cheyenne had—the one he drove a car through. It wasn’t as big as Ondine’s kitchen. The door was unlocked, but no one was home. In the kitchen a pepper pot was simmering, so he knew Old Man wasn’t far and wouldn’t be long. His father, Franklin G. Green, had been called Old Man since he was seven years old and when he grew up, got married, had a baby boy, the baby was called Old Man’s son until the second child was born and the first became simply Son. They all used to be here—all of them. Horace who lived in Gainesville, Frank G. who died in Korea, his sister Francine who was in a mental home in Jacksonville, and the baby girl Porky Green who still lived in Eloe, so Soldier said, but went to Florida A and M on a track scholarship. They had all been in this house together at one time—with his mother.

Only a few minutes had passed when Old Man climbed the porch steps. Son waited, standing in the middle of the room. The door opened, Old Man looked at Son and dropped his onions on the floor.

“Hey, Old Man, how you been doing?”

“Save me, you got back.”

They didn’t touch. They didn’t know how. They fooled around with the onions and each asked the other about his condition until Old Man said, “Come on in here and let me fix you something to eat. Not much in here but it ain’t like I had notice.”

“I ate something over to Soldier’s.”

“You was over there?”

“I wanted to hear about you before I came by,” said Son.

“Oh, I ain’t dead, Son. I ain’t dead,” he chuckled.

“I see you ain’t.”

“Them money orders sure helped.”

“You got them?”

“Oh, yeah. Every one. I had to use some of em though.”

“
Some
of em? They were all for you. Why didn’t you use them all?”

“I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to raise no suspicions. I just cashed a few when I couldn’t help it.”

“Shit, Old Man, don’t tell me you still got some?”

“They in there.” He nodded toward one of the two bedrooms. “Porky in school, you know. I had to help her out, too.”

They went in the bedroom and Old Man took a White Owl cigar box from under his bed and opened it. There was a thin pile of envelopes bound by a rubber band; some postal money orders held together with a paper clip, and a few ten and twenty dollar bills. Eight years of envelopes.

“These were for you, Old Man. To take care of you.”

“They did. They did. But you know I didn’t want to be going over there to the Post Office every month, cashin em. Might set folks to talkin and turn the law out on account of that other business. So I just took a few in every now and then. Quiet, you know.”

“Old Man, you one crazy old man.”

“You been to Sutterfield yet?”

“No. Straight here.”

“Well, you know Sally Brown died here a while back.”

“They told me.”

“Be at peace.”

“Hope so.”

“She slept with a shotgun every night.”

“Huh.”

“Every night. Well, she burnin up down there now, her and her nasty daughter…”

“Don’t say it, Old Man.”

“Yeah. You right. Shouldn’t rile the dead. But you know I was more scared of Sally than the law.”

“So was I.”

“Law don’t care about no dead colored gal, but Sally Brown, she slept with that shotgun every night waitin for you. Made my skin crinkle to walk past her. And she just about lived in church moanin. Stopped me from vespers altogether. I couldn’t sit there listenin to her berate you. Can you feature that? Pray every Sunday and hold on to a shotgun every night?”

“Where’s the boy?”

“Gone away from here, his folks too.”

“He get his eyebrows back?”

“Never did. Guess his folks figured he couldn’t hide nowhere around here lookin like that. Sally was lookin for him too.”

“I didn’t see his face. All I saw was his asshole.”

“That didn’t have no eyebrows either I bet,”

“I should have made him some with a razor.” They laughed together then and an hour or so passed while Son told what all he’d been doing for the last eight years. It was almost four when Son said, “I didn’t come by myself.”

“You with a woman?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is she?”

“Over to Soldier’s. Can she stay here?”

“You all married?”

“No, Old Man.”

“Better take her to your Aunt Rosa’s then.”

“She won’t like that.”

“I can’t help it. You be gone. I have to live here.”

“Come on, Old Man.”

“Uh-uh. Go see your Aunt Rosa. She be mad anyway you don’t stop by.”

“Scripture don’t say anything about two single people sleeping under the same roof.” Son was laughing.

“What you know bout Scripture?”

“I could have lied and said we were married.”

“But you didn’t lie. You told the truth and so you got to live by the truth.”

“Oh, shit.”

“That’s right. Shit. She’s welcome in my house all day in the day. Bring her back so I can meet her.”

“She’s special, Old Man.”

“So am I, Son. So am I.”

“All right. All right. I’ll go get her and bring her by. Cook up something, then I’ll take her by Aunt Rosa. That suit you?”

“Suit me fine.”

Son stood up to go, and his father walked him to the door. When Son said, “Be right back,” Old Man said, “Wait a minute. Can I ask you somethin?”

“Sure. Ask it.”

“How come you never put no note or nothin in them envelopes? I kept on lookin for a note.”

Son stopped. How hurried all those money order purchases had been. Most of the time he sent a woman out to both buy and mail them. He’d done it as often as he could and sometimes five would be sent from one city and none from any place for six months. How hurried he had been.

“I guess I didn’t want nobody to read em and know where I was…” But it was too lame an excuse to continue with. “Is that why you kept the empty envelopes too?”

“Yeah. They had your handwritin on em, you know. You wrote it, that part anyway. ‘Franklin Green.’ You got a nice handwritin. Pretty. Like your mama.”

“See you, Old Man.”

“Go by Rosa. Tell her you comin.”

J
ADINE
was squatting down in the middle of the road, the afternoon sun at her back. The children were happy to pose, and so were some of the younger women. Only the old folks refused to smile and glared into her camera as though looking at hell with the lid off. The men were enjoying the crease in her behind so clearly defined in the sunlight, click, click. Jadine had remembered her camera just before she thought she would go nuts, trying to keep a conversation going with Ellen and the neighbor women who came in to see Son’s Northern girl. They looked at her with outright admiration, each one saying, “I was in Baltimore once,” or, “My cousin she live in New York.” They did not ask her what they really wanted to know: where did she know Son from and how much did her boots cost. Jadine smiled, drank glasses of water and tried to talk “down home” like Ondine. But their worshipful stares and nonconversation made Son’s absence seem much too long. She was getting annoyed when she remembered her camera. Now she was having a ball photographing everybody. Soldier’s yard was full. “Beautiful,” she said. “Fantastic. Now over here,” click click. “Hey, what’d you say your name was? Okay, Beatrice, could you lean up against the tree?” click, click. “This way. Beautiful. Hold it. Hooooold it. Heaven,” click click click click.

Son didn’t mean to snatch it. Just to end it somehow. Stop the crease, the sunlight, the click click click. And when he did she looked at him with confusion at first, then with evolved anger. “What’s the matter with you?”

It wasn’t nice. To snatch the camera and then to have to tell her about the sleeping arrangements—it wasn’t nice. Not nice at all.

He took her to Old Man’s, and after supper there to Rosa’s. Drake and Soldier picked them up and drove them to a joint in Poncie called Night Moves, where there was live music, Bar B Que sandwiches and unrestrained dancing under four blue lights that neither flashed or strobed. They even managed some snatch in the car—Jadine under the impression that nobody knew; he aware that everybody did. The back seat turned her volume up, but the beer and the bad whiskey made her so sleepy there was no problem when he left her at Rosa’s. She slept like a boulder for three hours, then woke missing him and suffocating in that little bedroom without windows. She sat up naked, for she never wore nightgowns, and held her shoulders. The room had a door to the living room and one that opened to the back yard. She opened the latter and looked out into the blackest nothing she had ever seen. Blacker and bleaker than Isle des Chevaliers, and loud. Loud with the presence of plants and field life. If she was wanting air, there wasn’t any. It’s not possible, she thought, for anything to be this black. Maybe if she stood there long enough light would come from somewhere, and she could see shadows, the outline of something, a bush, a tree, a line between earth and sky, a heavier darkness to show where this very house stopped and space began. She remembered the blackness she saw when Son told her to close her eyes, and to put a star in it. That would be the only way it would get there, she thought, for the world in the direction of the sky, in that place where the sky ought to be, was starless. Haze, she guessed; there must be haze in the sky. Otherwise there would be a moon, at the least. The loudness of the plants was not audible, but it was strong nonetheless. She might as well have been in a cave, a grave, the dark womb of the earth, suffocating with the sound of plant life moving, but deprived of its sight. She could see nothing and could not remember what she had seen when it was daylight. A movement behind made her jump and turn around. Rosa was standing in the inner doorway, lit from behind by a lamp.