The Women (69 page)
Her eyes bled out at him. She turned up her palms and she was pleading now, her voice slipped down and gone, no more than a gargle in her throat. “Don’t you know what that means?”
He knew. If you dreamed of pork and a wedding, all in one dream, it meant the cataclysm was coming,
pop-pop,
the bloodletting, the horror. And maybe it was, but he didn’t want to hear about it. Not now. Not at this hour of the morning, when he had to put on his service jacket and go in amongst the white people and bow and scrape like a plantation nigger, not ever. “Shut that ignorance,” he said, whirling round on her.
pop-pop,
the bloodletting, the horror. And maybe it was, but he didn’t want to hear about it. Not now. Not at this hour of the morning, when he had to put on his service jacket and go in amongst the white people and bow and scrape like a plantation nigger, not ever. “Shut that ignorance,” he said, whirling round on her.
She shrank away from him, dwindling into her bones, but she was still there. Still talking. Still pushing him. She said: “What you do wid dat hatchet? ”
“Hatchet? What hatchet? I don’t know anything about any hatchet.”
“Under de pillow. For de shingle. Dat one.”
He shrugged, caught out in a lie, and what was she now, his keeper? “I don’t care,” he said, and he was just floating the words out there. “Protection. I keep it for protection.”
“From what? Bears?” Her eyes had sharpened. She was on the offensive and he didn’t like it one whit. “De redskin Indian wid dere tomahawk? T’ieves? Or maybe Jesus. Maybe Jesus gone come for you and you gone chop ’im up in little pieces.” She backed up a step, just out of reach, in her shift still, with her eyes like two coals shining in the stove, two red-hot fiery coals that nothing in this world could extinguish. “Julian,” she whispered. “Julian.”
“What? What is it? Can’t you see I’ve got work to do—?”
“I heard you. Las’ night. Night before dat too. You was sittin’ by the window dere, talkin’ to dat hatchet you was holdin’ in your lap like a baby child, like a hex doll. Dat what it is—dat your hex doll?”
There was no answering that kind of willful stupidity and she knew it before the words were out of her mouth because he’d taught her to know it and he was going to keep on teaching her till she learned it for good and he took two quick steps forward and caught her face in his right hand, pinching it there in the hollows of her jawbone so her mouth was distorted, and then he shoved that lewd hateful cringing black fish face as hard as he could so she fell away from him like one of her rag-and-bone voodoo poppets and that put him in a mood, it surely did.
But here he was in the courtyard, striding along with his head down and the peacocks wailing and the sun beating at him like a hammer, as full of pure rage as he’d ever been. One foot in front of the other, the cornfield down there like a tall green stand of cane, the closest thing to cane, and maybe she’d relent, maybe she’d step back and keep him on if he could just get down there into that field and let it all run out of him like the poison from a snakebit wound till his heart slowed and the beating stopped in his head. He was so intent he didn’t see the figure poised there in the shadows of the stable till the figure emerged into the chop of the light in one swift motion—a giant’s step—and took hold of his arm.
Brodelle. Brodelle in jodhpurs and riding boots, narrowing his wet blue eyes and pursing his lips round whatever it was he had to say, and what was it going to be this time? Lick my boots, kiss my arse, go fuck yourself? But no. “Saddle my horse, will you?” That was what it was. Saddle my horse. “I’m in a hurry.”
He didn’t have time to be astonished, the sequence of events as swift and sure and unstoppable as a row of dominoes all falling in a line, and he jerked his arm back as if he’d been stung, squared his shoulders under that sun and stared the man in the face, the fool, the interfering white fool who couldn’t have known what he was doing. He stared. Just stared. And here came the change, because Brodelle saw him now, really saw him, one man to another, the tight-jawed look of the deliverer of commands shading to something else, something puerile and powerless, because a command presupposes a response—scrape and bow,
Yassuh, Massah
—and Julian was giving him nothing. “What’s the matter with you—are you deaf? I said saddle the goddamn horse.”
Yassuh, Massah
—and Julian was giving him nothing. “What’s the matter with you—are you deaf? I said saddle the goddamn horse.”
One more full beat, holding fast to those soft sinking useless wet eyes and not a word needed, not a word to waste, and then he turned his back on him and went down the courtyard to where the green corn sprang up even as Brodelle cursed him—“You black nigger son of a bitch!”—knowing even then that there was no help now, not in the fields or anywhere else, because there were two voices speaking in his head, the one that said maybe, maybe I will, maybe she will, maybe, and the one that said never, never again, never, never, never.
She wasn’t much use as a nurse—she didn’t have the sympathy for it or the patience either and the sight of blood made her feel faint—but she bent to Gertrude, helped her to her feet and threw a frantic glance round the kitchen, looking for a scrap of cloth, a towel, anything to use as a compress. The pan was on the floor, a blackened slab of meat hissing beside it, the smoke faltering now, bellying and receding till it began to dissolve in transparent wisps. She went to the sink, ran cold water over the washrag she found hanging on a hook there and tried to press it to Gertrude’s eye, but Gertrude shied away. Wouldn’t look at her. “No, no, ma’am,” she kept saying. “No, no, don’t you bother. I jus’ fine. Julian too. Julian fine. Please, ma’am, please don’t go blamin’ Julian, ’cause half de time he don’t know what he do.”
“Doesn’t know?” She was outraged. How could this woman even begin to defend her husband when she herself had seen him kick her as remorselessly as he might have kicked an animal? “He beat you.”
“No, I slip on de wet spot and take a tumble, dass all.” The eyes came up now in a sidelong glance. Her hair had fallen loose in a solid kinked wedge that floated over one eyebrow in a glisten of the purest black. She had a blunted look to her, the look of suffering in all its forms and array, but there was something else there too, something distant and calculating.
It took a moment before Mamah realized it wasn’t fear of her husband that was driving her—this pretty young girl who only meant well—but fear of her, of the white woman who’d invaded the kitchen, the mistress of the house who could snap her fingers and hire and fire three times over. It was a shock. She’d seen women cowed by their husbands, living behind them, through them, as if they were mere instruments or tools, but this was sadder still, the saddest thing in the world. “You know I have to let you go,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Give ’im one more chance. He de good mon. You say so youself.”
But she was shaking her head, awash with emotion, soaked in it, trembling still with the dregs of the fear and rage that had thrown her up against that hateful black beast who’d beaten his wife as if she weren’t even human and was one step from turning on her too. It was impossible, intolerable to have that sort of thing in her own house as if they were in some foreign slum, some shanty crawling with every kind of violence and ignorance and fever. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I know it’s not your fault—you’re a good woman, I’m sure of it, a good dutiful young woman and a first-rate cook . . . but don’t you see? It’s just wrong. Wrong.”
She realized then that she still had the wet compress in her hand and she held it out before her with an insistent shake of her wrist till Gertrude stepped forward and took it. Then she went to the door, thinking of Frank because Frank would know what to do, Frank would handle this, and she didn’t care how hectic his work was or how much they needed him because he’d have to come home that very afternoon, on the next train, and she wouldn’t feel safe till he did. She’d get her bag and go right straight out the door and have Billy drive her to the telegraph office, that was what she was thinking, but she paused just a moment in the doorway to look back at Gertrude standing stock-still amidst the wreckage with the dripping rag clenched in one hand while she absently lifted the other to her lip and the dark stain of blood there. “You’ve got two weeks,” she said. And once more, one final time: “I’m sorry.”
Her first impulse was to go to the drafting room and rouse Brodelle or Herbert Fritz to go find Billy and she’d actually started off in that direction before she reversed herself and went instead to the bedroom for her purse and hat. She barely glanced at herself in the mirror—she was wrought up, her heart in her mouth, and there was no time to waste—and then she was striding through the house, past the kitchen, out the door to the loggia and into the drafting room. Herbert was there, bent over his desk, but Brodelle was nowhere to be seen.
“Herbert, I don’t mean to interrupt,” she said, and she could hear the agitation in her own voice, “but I was wondering if you’ve seen Billy—or, I mean, if you could go and fetch him, please. I’ve got to—it’s urgent.”
The boy was wearing a loose black satin tie and long trailing smock, in imitation of Frank, though it promised to be another hot day. He’d been deep in his work and he gave her a look of utter bewilderment, as if he’d suddenly lost the capacity to speak, snatching a quick glance at his drawing before he flushed and got to his feet. “He was here earlier, with Brodelle, an hour ago maybe—”
“Where
is
Emil?”
is
Emil?”
A duck of the head. “He said he was going to go riding before lunch—and work late, of course, to make up for it—”
She waved a hand in dismissal. “If you’d tell Billy to bring the motorcar round—I need to go into the village and I won’t be gone an hour. It’s very urgent.” He was already at the door, a scramble of limbs and the scrape of his shoes, when she called out to him. “I won’t be taking the children.” She hesitated a moment, watching his face—he was still flustered but anxious to please, a good boy, malleable, likable. “Would you look in on them—if it’s not too much trouble?”
The sun was already baking the flagstones of the courtyard as Billy held the door for her and she climbed into the car, everything still and peaceful and not the hint of a breeze. Billy was in his work clothes, as clean and precise and neat as he always was, no matter the job or its demands or how grease-stained and mud-caked his fellow workers might have been. He tipped his hat to her as he slid behind the wheel—“Looks to be another scorcher,” he said and she answered that it certainly did—and that was the last thing she said until he pulled up in front of the Western Union office and she instructed him to wait there for her. She’d wanted to confide in him, but the thought of the scene in the kitchen was too humiliating, too overwhelming, to confide to anyone. She’d had a shock, that was it. And she wasn’t over it yet.
It took her two minutes to compose the telegram—COME AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE STOP SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED—and then she paid the man, got in the car and had Billy drive her back to Taliesin, trying to stay calm, telling herself that this crisis would pass as they all invariably did and that Frank would be there to support her, as he’d always been and always would be.
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174
When Billy turned in off the main road, she watched the house emerge from its frame of trees, a house more precious and exquisite than anything in Tuscany or Umbria or anywhere else—the sky above and Frank’s creation below, every detail spun out of his head and for her, for her—and it made her glad and proud too. And it calmed her, just the sight of it, because there was no place she’d rather be. It was home. She was home. And as Billy shifted gears to climb the hill she felt a stab of nostalgia so powerful the tears came to her eyes, but she was quick to dab them with her handkerchief and avert her face so Billy wouldn’t notice. It was nerves, that was all.
She sent Herbert to tell the cook that she and the children would be taking lunch separately out on the screened-in porch and that the workmen would be served in the dining room, and Herbert bobbed back almost immediately to say that the cook was asking how many they’d be. She was seated at her desk, rereading a paragraph she’d already read twelve times over, feigning normalcy—everything was on an even keel, nothing amiss, and she wanted them all to believe that, even Carleton—and she looked up and counted them off on her fingers. “Well, let’s see,” she said, “Brodelle’s here somewhere, isn’t he?”
“He’s back at his desk, yes.”
“All right: Emil and you, and Brunker and Lindblom—that makes four. And Billy makes five.”
“And Billy’s kid.”
“Ernest.” She smiled. “He’s busy learning his father’s trade, is he? I hope he’ll keep up his studies when school starts up again in the fall—there’s no substitute for a good education, wouldn’t you agree?”
He shuffled and stammered a bit, but certainly he agreed—that was the whole point of his being here at Taliesin under the hand of Mr. Wright—and of course, he’d appreciated the gift of
The Woman Movement
, which he was finding very . . . stimulating.
The Woman Movement
, which he was finding very . . . stimulating.
She thanked him. Told him he was very kind. And thanked him too for acting as go-between for her and the cook—she wasn’t feeling very well and her work had reached a critical stage . . .
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