Those Across the River (10 page)

I was writing. I had introduced the character of Lucien Savoyard and then discussed his grandfather Michel, a Frenchman who had been a hussar in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, survived the frozen march in Russia and one in Waterloo. Then I spent half a chapter on Lucien’s father, Arnaud, a New Orleans tycoon who made a fortune investing in whaling ships, silk and slaves. These men didn’t seem to have childhoods; the fathers had a tradition of shutting the boys up in faraway church schools until they were old enough to show up and inherit. The fathers drowned, or shot themselves in middle age.

The next thing was to introduce Lucien and discuss his decision to move the family’s wealth and future to Georgia to take advantage of the cotton boom. That would include a physical description of the house he would christen La Boudeuse—the Pouting House—and her Louisiana-style architecture.

Of course, what I needed to do quite soon was get into the woods and find the plantation. But not today.

Today I just had to get out of the cellar.

I had moved the dining room table and typewriter down the cellar stairs to get away from the punishing heat in the study, but now the smell of mildew had given me a headache. The greyish, overcast light coming through the cracked ground-level window compounded this. Also, now that I had lost momentum, I kept getting distracted looking at all the boxes of my aunt Dottie’s old clothes and goods I had meant to free from their tangle of spiderwebs and investigate. The spiders down here were legion.

I needed a break.

 

 

 

IT OCCURRED TO me to take a walk to Miller’s General Store and see about having a glass of sweet tea on the porch. I wasn’t the only one that had occurred to; Saturday was a big day there. Several farmers had left their fields for these hours between noon and four to sit in the cool of the porch and play checkers, including a fortyish man named Miles Falmouth whose back had been grieving him “biblical,” or “positively Ole Tessament.” He was leaning sideways on his bench near the checkerboard, holding forth on the state of his health while waiting for Old Man Gordeau to move.

Gordeau was winning that game. He didn’t lose many. Aside from being mayor of the town, he grew black-eyed peas and tomatoes, and kept horses, goats and pigs. His pride lay in his dogs, however. Part bloodhound, Gordeau’s dogs had become a recognizable local breed, and he never failed to sell his litters to hunters even several towns away.

I stood behind one-armed Mike, whose attention fluttered between the drama on the checkerboard and the gospel music coming in warm and tinny from Paul’s radio inside.

The other seat was filled by Buster Simms, whose wife, I later found out, was called “Mrs. Bust-her-seams” in less Christian circles; but never in front of Buster, whose hands looked big and strong enough to twist a horseshoe straight. Their children, while not attractive in the traditional sense, were a source of pride for the Simms family in that they outweighed any children born in Whitbrow since the Great War. Everything was round in Buster’s life. In the summer he sold melons. Pumpkins in the fall.

Buster was the second-best checker player after the old man.

He leaned forward in a way that made his chair look delicate, eager to see what the old man’s next move would be. Miles was opening his mouth to ask Paul to change the radio to try to catch a weather report or some feed prices, knowing beforehand that one-armed Mike would protest and lobby for another twenty minutes of gospel.

This was the tableau the large, bald black man froze when he walked past us on the porch and entered the general store, letting the screen door bang behind him so that its little bell rang. Paul Miller would later remember that flies came in with him.

Everyone looked inside to see what his business was.

Aside from the Chicago moving-men, I had not seen a colored in or near Whitbrow.

Jesus, he was big and strong-looking.

That was my first thought. My second was what a good subject for photography he would make; the structure of his face was handsome and symmetrical, and his broad shoulders and thin waist suggested an impressive athleticism. He would have to stand with new clothes, though; the ones he wore were none too clean.

He did not enter the store the way black men often entered white establishments. He did not look down, nor did he state his business by way of asking permission to approach: “Sir, I’s comin to ask if you got any cornmeal and how much it coss.“ In fact, he did not speak at all at first. He just glided in with the light bouncing off the carefully shaved dome of his head, and he went to the goods he wanted as if he had stocked the shelves himself.

He bought salt, coffee and sugar. And a pickle.

“Anything else?” Paul asked, trying to sound neither hostile nor overly friendly.

I expected the man to shake his head, but he spoke. Everyone was looking at him, but he seemed to notice only Paul.

“No, sir. These shall be sufficient. If I think of anything else, I shall return for it.”

What was that accent? Caribbean? West Indies?

And then he paid.

As he made his way out, he did something queer; he stopped, holding the door open, and sniffed the air on the porch. And then he looked at me. Not long enough to draw anyone’s attention but mine.

He left then, letting the door bang good and hard as he went.

If the flies had in fact arrived with him, they decided to stay.

“How do you like that?” Miles said, once the man was out of earshot. “Nigger said
sufficient
. And Paul jes reached in an jerked him out a pickle like he was gonna get mad if he didn’t get his pickle fast enough.”

“His money’s good,” Paul said, coming to stand in the doorway, wiping his hands with a rag.

“Well, hell if I’d feed him, jes reach in and feed him. If you got to take his money, hand him over the tongs and let him get his own damn pickle.”

Paul said, “Yeah, and if I’d a done that, you’d a said, ‘I cain’t believe you let that nigger touch your tongs.’ Made me put out two pair a tongs. Ain’t no pleasin you about a nigger. Like I said, his money’s good as yours.”

“Damn right his money’s good,” Gordeau said. “Less I miss my guess, that’s the same one used to bring coins and jewels in to Harry fore he closed up. Old stuff, old watches and shit, God knows where from. I don’t think he’s been around since that year we got all them grasshoppers.”

Buster Simms, who liked boxing and who had won some money at bare-knuckle fights in the mill town before love opened his huge fists, said he thought the man must be a visiting colored fighter.

“Nah,” Miles said. “He’s one of them sharecroppers working Dwight Newsome’s land, up near Chalk Ridge. Either that or he’s a squatter livin out in them woods pass the river.”

“Ain’t no Chalk Ridge nigger built like that,” Old Man Gordeau said. “They all got the pee-lagra. Look like scarecrows and cain’t hardly lift their heads. Don’t think he’s no squatter neither.”

“Wait, I know that ole boy,” one-armed Mike said.

“Here it comes,” said Paul.

“Yeah, he keeps roosters for a gang man outta Chicago. And they say he got him a white woman.”

“With a white woman and everything. I love it,” Buster said.

“Yeah. And he don’t stay with her but in the winter cause he cain’t be bothered with no wife come rooster season.”

“Oh, Lord,” Paul said.

“Frank here’s born in Chicago,” Gordeau said. “Did you know that, Mike? Could be he knows your gangster.”

“I am the gangster,” Frank said, “but they closed down my speakeasy so I had to make like a bird and fly south.”

“When you gonna fight your roosters?” Mike said.

“Quiet as a church mouse all day, but once he gets started he don’t shut up,” said Paul.

“On second thought,” I said, spying Dora across the town square, “I am the rooster. And if you gentlemen will excuse me, I see a French hen I have some business with.”

 

 

 

I INTERCEPTED EUDORA as she crossed the town square. She was just about to reprove me for something, probably being away from my typewriter, but I kissed her so hard she forgot whatever it was. The sound of good-natured whistles from the porch of the general store cut us short, and we both giggled like kids.

We sat on the benches near the tea roses, and Dora told me about her day with the Nobles, how Arthur Noble showed her the pecan orchards he harvested to sell in the mill town and at his service station. She told me how Ursie bounced at her heels all day, manhandling her new kitten. She had wanted a cat for some time and, owing to a worsening mouse problem, Arthur had finally relaxed his opposition to the idea. Four days ago he had found a little grey kitten in a box with three dead siblings and brought the live one home. Having met Arthur briefly, I voiced my unworthy suspicion that he found four living cats but didn’t want that many underfoot. Dora pinched me.

I was about to mention the Negro who came into the general store, but what was there to tell? A well-mannered colored man had come to the general store to buy salt, and when he left, the Southern gentlemen had mocked him and told stories about him.

At just that moment I saw him come out of Estel Blake’s hardware shop with a spool of wire around his shoulder and the bag from the general store in his hand. He was chewing the last of his pickle. He crossed the square lawn diagonally, making right for us.

He was staring at Dora.

He stopped in front of us.

His nostrils widened as he took in our scent.

He kept staring at Dora.

Unbidden, the word
nigger
rose up in my head and almost pushed its way into my mouth. The barbarous impulse to spit that word at him and animalize him with it was so strong that tamping it down paralyzed me. For several long seconds all I could do was stare at him while he stared at Dora and she stared at the ground.

“I believe you are making the lady uncomfortable,” I said, although neither of us was convinced by the undercurrent of menace I tried to inject. I was flatly no match for this powerfully built man.

He bowed cordially then.

“Beggin your pardon, marse,” he said, and turned lithely away from us, walking off down the road that led east. Dora’s nose wrinkled in distaste.

But she did watch him go.

I thought about him all the way home.

Was there an accent to his speech? It was faint.

He didn’t sound like a Georgia black; that much was sure.

When I got home, I went back down to the musty, spidery cellar amongst the reeking boxes of my aunt’s that might be full of trash or treasure. I sat in front of the typewriter for some time without hitting a key. I just stared at the dirty window without seeing it, thinking about the pregnant days before the States’ War, the days when everyone knew what was coming, but not how hungry it was, how long it would stay.

I
T WAS LATE August when I went to interview Bessie Wilcox at the Sunny Rest nursing home just outside the mill town. I hated the euphemistic names they hung on nursing homes, as if old folks were small children who didn’t know what was in store for them. If I opened one I’d call it Yelling All Night Manor or Chafing Acres. Granted, I might not attract many tenants, but they would be realists.

Sunny Rest, while not as bad as some of the desperately overcrowded and perpetually uric facilities I had seen on Chicago’s South Side, distinguished itself with a kind of hopeless torpor that had also spread to the staff, which on this hot afternoon consisted of a scarecrowish, twitchy white woman with her hair lacquered unbecomingly to her head and a pillow-bosomed colored lady who seemed half-asleep.

I asked them if I might speak to Mrs. Wilcox on the pretext that I was her nephew. They were accommodating enough.

I winked at Mrs. Wilcox, and she nodded from her bed and motioned Dora and me to sit down. The old folks waiting to die in these places would say the Devil was their nephew for the chance to talk to somebody new.

Her blue eyes blinked a lot behind her dirty glasses.

“You ain’t my nephew. I got three livin. Two of em’s in Atlanty and the last one’s in the can. Tell me who you are, though.”

“Frank Nichols. Dottie McComb was my aunt.”

“Oh,” she said. “You here for the money? Cuz I ain’t got none. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s good. You’re a good boy. I’d a never let Henry borrow that money if I’d knowed about the boll weevils; lost everything any damn way. Would you reach me some tea?”

She motioned towards a sweating, chipped pitcher on the nightstand and a cup with a blue flower on it.

Dora beat me to her feet and poured the cup full. Bessie took it, and got a lot of it on her chin and down her front when she drank. I saw Dora look around for a towel, but there wasn’t one.

“Mrs. Wilcox, I’m actually here because I’m writing a book about the war, and I was hoping to ask you some questions.”

“What’s she for?” she said, indicating Dora.

“Taking notes.”

“Huh.”

“What do you remember about the States’ War?”

“So you must be Katherine’s.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Prettiest child I ever saw.”

“Thank you.”

“I was just a little girl durin that war. A little barefoot girl.”

“Anything you remember would help.”

“I wish my girls had been pretty like that, but Henry, he wasn’t much to look at. After a pretty man breaks your heart, you’re happy for a plain man. You gonna break this one’s heart?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No, I reckon not,” she said, looking at Dora for the first time. “Reckon she’s gonna break yours.”

“Let’s hope not,” I said.

“Yep. She will. She got them crazy, two-daddy eyes on her.”