The Complete Stories (28 page)

Mrs. Pritchard heaved herself from the chimney and waved her arm in a fierce circle but he pretended not to hear. She stalked to the edge of the lawn and screamed, “Get off, I toljer! She wants you!”

He got off and started toward the chimney, pushing his head and shoulders forward at each step to give the appearance of hurrying. His head was thrust up to the top in a white cloth hat streaked with different shades of sweat. The brim was down and hid all but the lower parts of his reddish eyes.

Mrs. Cope was on her knees, pointing the trowel into the ground. “Why aren't you going through the gate there?” she asked and waited, her eyes shut and her mouth stretched flat as if she were prepared for any ridiculous answer.

“Got to raise the blade on the mower if we do,” he said and his gaze bore just to the left of her. Her Negroes were as destructive and impersonal as the nut grass.

Her eyes, as she opened them, looked as if they would keep on enlarging until they turned her wrongsideout. “Raise it,” she said and pointed across the road with the trowel.

He moved off.

“It's nothing to them,” she said. “They don't have the responsibility. I thank the Lord all these things don't come at once. They'd destroy me.”

“Yeah, they would,” Mrs. Pritchard shouted against the sound of the tractor. He opened the gate and raised the blade and drove through and down into the field; the noise diminished as the wagon disappeared. “I don't see myself how she had it
in
it,” she went on in her normal voice.

Mrs. Cope was bent over, digging fiercely at the nut grass again. “We have a lot to be thankful for,” she said. “Every day you should say a prayer of thanksgiving. Do you do that?”

“Yes'm,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “See she was in it four months before she even got thataway. Look like to me if I was in one of them, I would leave off … how you reckon they…?”

“Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving,” Mrs. Cope said. “Think of all we have. Lord,” she said and sighed, “we have everything,” and she looked around at her rich pastures and hills heavy with timber and shook her head as if it might all be a burden she was trying to shake off her back.

Mrs. Pritchard studied the woods. “All I got is four abscess teeth,” she remarked.

“Well, be thankful you don't have five,” Mrs. Cope snapped and threw back a clump of grass. “We might all be destroyed by a hurricane. I can always find something to be thankful for.”

Mrs. Pritchard took up a hoe resting against the side of the house and struck lightly at a weed that had come up between two bricks in the chimney. “I reckon
you
can,” she said, her voice a little more nasal than usual with contempt.

“Why, think of all those poor Europeans,” Mrs. Cope went on, “that they put in boxcars like cattle and rode them to Siberia. Lord,” she said, “we ought to spend half our time on our knees.”

“I know if I was in an iron lung there would be some things I wouldn't do,” Mrs. Pritchard said, scratching her bare ankle with the end of the hoe.

“Even that poor woman had plenty to be thankful for,” Mrs. Cope said.

“She could be thankful she wasn't dead.”

“Certainly,” Mrs. Cope said, and then she pointed the trowel up at Mrs. Pritchard and said, “I have the best kept place in the county and do you know why? Because I work. I've had to work to save this place and work to keep it.” She emphasized each word with the trowel. “I don't let anything get ahead of me and I'm not always looking for trouble. I take it as it comes.”

“If it all come at oncet sometime,” Mrs. Pritchard began.

“It doesn't all come at once,” Mrs. Cope said sharply.

The child could see over to where the dirt road joined the highway. She saw a pick-up truck stop at the gate and let off three boys who started walking up the pink dirt road. They walked single file, the middle one bent to the side carrying a black pig-shaped valise.

“Well, if it ever did,” Mrs. Pritchard said, “it wouldn't be nothing you could do but fling up your hands.”

Mrs. Cope didn't even answer this. Mrs. Pritchard folded her arms and gazed down the road as if she could easily enough see all these fine hills flattened to nothing. She saw the three boys who had almost reached the front walk by now. “Lookit yonder,” she said. “Who you reckon they are?”

Mrs. Cope leaned back and supported herself with one hand behind her and looked. The three came toward them but as if they were going to walk on through the side of the house. The one with the suitcase was in front now. Finally about four feet from her, he stopped and set it down. The three boys looked something alike except that the middle-sized one wore silver-rimmed spectacles and carried the suitcase. One of his eyes had a slight cast to it so that his gaze seemed to be coming from two directions at once as if it had them surrounded. He had on a sweat shirt with a faded destroyer printed on it but his chest was so hollow that the destroyer was broken in the middle and seemed on the point of going under. His hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looked to be about thirteen. All three boys had white penetrating stares. “I don't reckon you remember me, Mrs. Cope,” he said.

“Your face is certainly familiar,” she murmured, scrutinizing him. “Now let's see…”

“My daddy used to work here,” he hinted.

“Boyd?” she said. “Your father was Mr. Boyd and you're J.C.?”

“Nome, I'm Powell, the secont one, only I've growed some since then and my daddy he's daid now. Done died.”

“Dead. Well I declare,” Mrs. Cope said as if death were always an unusual thing. “What was Mr. Boyd's trouble?”

One of Powell's eyes seemed to be making a circle of the place, examining the house and the white water tower behind it and the chicken houses and the pastures that rolled away on either side until they met the first line of woods. The other eye looked at her. “Died in Florda,” he said and began kicking the valise.

“Well I declare,” she murmured. After a second she said, “And how is your mother?”

“Mah'd again.” He kept watching his foot kick the suitcase. The other two boys stared at her impatiently.

“And where do you all live now?” she asked.

“Atlanta,” he said. “You know, out to one of them developments.”

“Well I see,” she said, “I see.” After a second she said it again. Finally she asked, “And who are these other boys?” and smiled at them.

“Garfield Smith him, and W. T. Harper him,” he said, nodding his head backward first in the direction of the large boy and then the small one.

“How do you boys do?” Mrs. Cope said. “This is Mrs. Pritchard. Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard work here now.”

They ignored Mrs. Pritchard who watched them with steady beady eyes. The three seemed to hang there, waiting, watching Mrs. Cope.

“Well well,” she said, glancing at the suitcase, “it's nice of you to stop and see me. I think that was real sweet of you.”

Powell's stare seemed to pinch her like a pair of tongs. “Come back to see how you was doing,” he said hoarsely.

“Listen here,” the smallest boy said, “all the time we been knowing him he's been telling us about this here place. Said it was everything here. Said it was horses here. Said he had the best time of his entire life right here on this here place. Talks about it all the time.”

“Never shuts his trap about this place,” the big boy grunted, drawing his arm across his nose as if to muffle his words.

“Always talking about them horses he rid here,” the small one continued, “and said he would let us ride them too. Said it was one name Gene.”

Mrs. Cope was always afraid someone would get hurt on her place and sue her for everything she had. “They aren't shod,” she said quickly. “There was one named Gene but he's dead now but I'm afraid you boys can't ride the horses because you might get hurt. They're dangerous,” she said, speaking very fast.

The large boy sat down on the ground with a noise of disgust and began to finger rocks out of his tennis shoe. The small one darted looks here and there and Powell fixed her with his stare and didn't say anything.

After a minute the little boy said, “Say, lady, you know what he said one time? He said when he died he wanted to come here!”

For a second Mrs. Cope looked blank; then she blushed; then a peculiar look of pain came over her face as she realized that these children were hungry. They were staring because they were hungry! She almost gasped in their faces and then she asked them quickly if they would have something to eat. They said they would but their expressions, composed and unsatisfied, didn't lighten any. They looked as if they were used to being hungry and it was no business of hers.

The child upstairs had grown red in the face with excitement. She was kneeling down by the window so that only her eyes and forehead showed over the sill. Mrs. Cope told the boys to come around on the other side of the house where the lawn chairs were and she led the way and Mrs. Pritchard followed. The child moved from the right bedroom across the hall and over into the left bedroom and looked down on the other side of the house where there were three white lawn chairs and red hammock strung between two hazelnut trees. She was a pale fat girl of twelve with a frowning squint and a large mouth full of silver bands. She knelt down at the window.

The three boys came around the corner of the house and the large one threw himself into the hammock and lit a stub of cigarette. The small boy tumbled down on the grass next to the black suitcase and rested his head on it and Powell sat down on the edge of one of the chairs and looked as if he were trying to enclose the whole place in one encircling stare. The child heard her mother and Mrs. Pritchard in a muted conference in the kitchen. She got up and went out into the hall and leaned over the banisters.

Mrs. Cope's and Mrs. Pritchard's legs were facing each other in the back hall. “Those poor children are hungry,” Mrs. Cope said in a dead voice.

“You seen that suitcase?” Mrs. Pritchard asked. “What if they intend to spend the night with you?”

Mrs. Cope gave a slight shriek. “I can't have three boys in here with only me and Sally Virginia,” she said. “I'm sure they'll go when I feed them.”

“I only know they got a suitcase,” Mrs. Pritchard said.

The child hurried back to the window. The large boy was stretched out in the hammock with his wrists crossed under his head and the cigarette stub in the center of his mouth. He spit it out in an arc just as Mrs. Cope came around the corner of the house with a plate of crackers. She stopped instantly as if a snake had been slung in her path. “Ashfield!” she said. “Please pick that up. I'm afraid of fires.”

“Gawfield!” the little boy shouted indignantly. “Gawfield!”

The large boy raised himself without a word and lumbered for the butt. He picked it up and put it in his pocket and stood with his back to her, examining a tattooed heart on his forearm. Mrs. Pritchard came up holding three Coca-Colas by the necks in one hand and gave one to each of them.

“I remember everything about this place,” Powell said, looking down the opening of his bottle.

“Where did you all go when you left here?” Mrs. Cope asked and put the plate of crackers on the arm of his chair.

He looked at it but didn't take one. He said, “I remember it was one name Gene and it was one name George. We gone to Florda and my daddy he, you know, died, and then we gone to my sister's and then my mother she, you know, mah'd, and we been there ever since.”

“There are some crackers,” Mrs. Cope said and sat down in the chair across from him.

“He don't like it in Atlanta,” the little boy said, sitting up and reaching indifferently for a cracker. “He ain't ever satisfied with where he's at except this place here. Lemme tell you what he'll do, lady. We'll be playing ball, see, on this here place in this development we got to play ball on, see, and he'll quit playing and say, ‘Goddam, it was a horse down there name Gene and if I had him here I'd bust this concrete to hell riding him!'”

“I'm sure Powell doesn't use words like that, do you, Powell?” Mrs. Cope said.

“No, mam,” Powell said. His head was turned completely to the side as if he were listening for the horses in the field.

“I don't like them kind of crackers,” the little boy said and returned his to the plate and got up.

Mrs. Cope shifted in her chair. “So you boys live in one of those nice new developments,” she said.

“The only way you can tell your own is by smell,” the small boy volunteered. “They're four stories high and there's ten of them, one behind the other. Let's go see them horses,” he said.

Powell turned his pinching look on Mrs. Cope. “We thought we would just spend the night in your barn,” he said. “My uncle brought us this far on his pick-up truck and he's going to stop for us again in the morning.”

There was a moment in which she didn't say a thing and the child in the window thought: she's going to fly out of that chair and hit the tree.

“Well, I'm afraid you can't do that,” she said, getting up suddenly. “The barn's full of hay and I'm afraid of fire from your cigarettes.”

“We won't smoke,” he said.

“I'm afraid you can't spend the night in there just the same,” she repeated as if she were talking politely to a gangster.

“Well, we can camp out in the woods then,” the little boy said. “We brought our own blankets anyways. That's what we got in theter suitcase. Come on.”

“In the woods!” she said. “Oh no! The woods are very dry now, I can't have people smoking in my woods. You'll have to camp out in the field, in this field here next to the house, where there aren't any trees.”

“Where she can keep her eye on you,” the child said under her breath.