Two Shades of Morning (10 page)

“I was just wondering,” I said.

“He did but he’s done gone, early on,” she said.

“Thank you, Miss Eular.” I hung up on the questioning silence.

In a few minutes, the phone rang, but it was only Miss Eloise, my neighbor, calling to share her tip on watering down an off-brand of shampoo. Finally, I told her I had to go but I’d try the shampoo tip.

By eleven o’clock, I was frantic. I’d been through all the what-ifs again and added some, torn between being worried, mad and suspicious. I looked at some magazines and did my toe nails, then lay face down on the couch with my burning back up.

Aunt Birdie’s voice spirited into my living room: A woman shore does a lot of waiting. The remark had stuck because it was her sole revelation about personal trouble between her and her husband, Pap—dead going on five years—and because it was the truth. A woman sure did do a lot of waiting. The statement had also stuck in my head because she’d said it to me, not to Mama or Miss Lettie with me in earshot, and her saying it to me meant I was a woman now, a waiting woman. She had told how Uncle Pap and Emmet Moore, who used to own the grocery store in Little Town, would get to drinking and go out riding with a girl they called “Candy Block,” known to be “loose.” Emmet Moore had bought a new Ford convertible (the same one parked in my backyard) and they’d be gone for days. Evidently, Aunt Birdie would wait; she never got to the point, if there was a point, but she told how she’d waited and had been too ashamed to go even to the post office. A woman shore does a lot of waiting had been her before-marriage talk to me.

Earlier, I had turned on the radio, listening to music that kept running into news—more on the Vietnam war, how many Americans had died that day, names of places as distant to me as old-age. At twelve o’clock, I turned it off, beyond worry, beyond mad, numb and perking my ears for the sound of P.W.’s pickup slowing on the highway and turning off on our road. I knew exactly how it would sound speeding up to our trailer, glass-pack mufflers crying then dying at the back door. Pacing, I started thinking, linking thoughts: where would he go? where did he usually go? Lately, nowhere but to work or to Sibyl’s. My scalp prickled—a signal I trusted to alert me to snakes under foot and lightning close by.

I went out the kitchen door and gazed across my yard to hers, bright as moonlight under the four security lights hung from the oaks. I could see a pickup parked beside the house, on the outside of the carport, but I couldn’t tell whether it was P.W.’s blue truck or Robert Dale’s green one—the fake moon-glow of the lights turned everything gray. Squinting, I crept down the steps and across my yard, toward her house, my eyes never leaving the gray truck, until I got close enough to make out a ding on the right door where P.W. had kicked it a few months ago.

Relief poured over me, then anger. I started back to our trailer, getting madder. Why hadn’t he at least called? Why had he gone there when he knew I was home? I could understand how he might have thought I’d be there and stopped by, but to stay when I was home... I ran up the trailer doorsteps and into the kitchen. At the stove, I dumped the peas and chicken and rice and rolls into the big pot full of chicken grease, went again to the door and slung the gumbo to the grass, losing the pot too.

“I could kill you, P.W.!” I hollered. “I’m sick of this!” I hated him more than I’d ever loved him. The after-ring of my voice and the clattering pots vibrated the trailer, made it feel hollow and flimsy as a playhouse. In a few minutes, I heard his truck start next door, and I headed for the couch, curling into a tight trembling ball.

He stomped up the back doorsteps, pausing to look at the strewn food. Then he walked into the kitchen, looking askance at the gravy he’d tracked on the green and white tiles. When he got to the living room, he stopped and stared at me.

“Where have you been?” I asked, trying to remember simple words I’d learned when I was two, but the thundering in my head muddled them.

“At Robert Dale and them’s,” he said and sailed his cap with the fertilizer emblem through the charged air to his throne, the recliner.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“I bet you ain’t got the least notion, have you?”

“What?” I stood up; my hair did too.

He was dirty and dusty, straight from the fields. His blue eyes bluer in his gray-coated face. One knee, cocked before him, stuck out through a tear in his jeans. He looked pitiful and abused, and I was the abuser, the infidel who had slit his pants.

“Oh, no,” I said, staying in that one spot. “She’s not going to do that to me, not this time. Just let me tell you all about sweet Sibyl.”

“I’d be ashamed of myself if I was you, Earlene,” he said, shaming me with his eyes. “She told me and Robert Dale all about what you did.”

“She what?”

He started for the bathroom, passed right by me, mumbling something remarkably fresh and relevant: “And her dying of a rare blood...”

I was spared the final word by the shower’s drum roll on the thin stall walls. “Rare,” I said. Trying to make sense of something, I started walking, going nowhere really but toward the back door, for what reason I couldn’t say, only going and the door happened to be open, a convenience. I went through it, then through the mush of food on the grass. That damned Bermuda grass! Big Girls do cry...

Big Girls do Cry

Big Girls do cry

Crying and feverish, I was off to Sibyl’s, gliding toward the lights of the house that changed faces like its mistress. The moss in the oaks embossed eerie shadows on the yard in the fake moon-glow. A whitish film on the red paint.

Before I got to the carport, I saw the back door open and Robert Dale push the screen wide and turn to reach behind him. Sibyl, wan and stooped, held his arm and stepped out, then stood a minute to wrap herself, as if she was cold on that hot summer night. Robert Dale opened the car door and she slid in ahead, her lambent hair going dull.

I stepped behind one of the oaks and watched as he got in beside her and started the car, then circled out to the road. Frozen, I kept my eyes on the red tail lights accented in the dark along the dirt road to the highway.

#

That night I lay on the couch, listening to P.W.’s sleep-breathing in our bedroom, waiting for Robert Dale to come and tell us it was finished; seeing, as I dozed, the red house vanish and the old house rise and our starting over.

The next morning the telephone woke me with a startling trill I wasn’t used to when sleeping in the bedroom. I could feel the trailer was vacant, could smell the stale grease of last night’s frying. Sunlight through the front wall of windows filled every space. I stumbled toward the phone on the opposite wall, glad it was over, and got ready to comfort Robert Dale.

“Yes?” I said, lifting the receiver and waiting through a holocaust of silence on the other end. It should be this way, I thought, a pause before the grand announcement. “Erlie? Is that you?” Sibyl’s mocking voice, her laugh.

I must have said something, but I only remember the receiver cold in my hand, like the wrung neck of a mean rooster.

“Erlie, I just wanted to call you up and let you know I’ve put everything behind us. Are you still there?”

“Yes,” I said, sitting on P.W.’s throne and stretching the telephone cord taut.

“Did anybody tell you I’m in the hospital?” She waited for me to answer.

“No.”

#

#

When Sibyl got home she acted as if nothing had changed, but everything had for me and P.W. He treated me like he hated me at first—avoiding me, staying out nights, coming home only to sleep. Finally, he started coming home every other night or so to eat supper, which I’d kept cooking regardless. I was civil; he was cold. Inside I was raging, rabid with what I now knew but didn’t know how to make anybody else know—what to do with what had come clear to me through the haze around Sibyl. Too, I honestly thought somehow P.W. and I would make up and put an end to our fighting. Aunt Birdie always said that even a cow’s tail has an end. Maybe that’s why I went to Sibyl’s again when she invited me, why we became a foursome again. Also, I felt that to know Sibyl—what she was up to—and not fight back at that point was smarter. I wasn’t defeated, only retrenching for the final battle.

Sibyl seemed oddly more subdued after she got home from the hospital than when she was there, sick or whatever. Less animated; she was almost lovely, wan and toned-down, inconspicuously steadying herself against a wall until her very silence drew our attention. Robert Dale would jump up and lead her to a chair and she’d push him away. She would shake her head bravely, then end up leaning into him after all.

One night, after we’d finished eating, she got up from the table, enviably thinner, and left the room.

Robert Dale watched her go, gazing where she’d walked across the floor as though she’d left muddy tracks. “She doesn’t have long,” he said and bowed his head. His cowlick, whorled on the crown, made him look pathetic.

“Ain’t no law says they can’t be wrong.” P.W.’s jaw twitched, his eyes fixed on a congealing scrap of fat pared from his steak.

“I don’t look for it,” said Robert Dale, listening to the hollow tread of her steps on the second floor.

I knew they expected me to follow, to check on her, but I sat and watched each of their faces grow stale with her absence and relished not having been swayed into my usual spring-board compassion. I smiled sweetly. Truth was, I could have killed her if she hadn’t been already dying.

“You reckon there’s any truth to Emmet Allen running for sheriff again next term?” P.W. was picking his teeth.

Robert Dale laughed. “I wouldn’t figger him for that big a fool.”

P.W. jabbed his toothpick into the crescent of fat. “You never can tell,” he said. “Sheriff Walker has been in just about long enough to run up enough enemies to turn the table.”

In 1961, I’d gone with Robert Dale to the courthouse in Little Town to help bury the defeated politicians to make up for having gone with P.W. to the Future Farmers banquet the Friday night before. Paybacks that cost.

The rain had relaxed to a drizzle that March Monday night, having all day soused the heads of voters scurrying in and out of the new courthouse to cast ballots for the county commissioners, the board of education and the sheriff.

Robert Dale had been excited that night, his usually pale face brightened by the pine torches he’d passed out to the crowd from the stack on back of his pickup. Handing one to me, he’d stepped into the mob of rowdy men, women and children, relighting dampened torches from his own. Everything took on a reddish cast: the rain-glazed leaves of the live oaks, the white clapboard front of Moore’s store across the road. The darkness itself, wreathed in smoke, deflected the flares, and the heavy odor of burning pine tar pressed down on the muggy air. At the crossing, the single traffic light mirrored on the wet streets like glass. The torches hissed and flared in the drizzle against a background of jeering, moiling strangers whose sane faces I saw everyday. The mock burials, though in jest, never failed to seem sadistic. I’d heard so many stories of cross-burnings by the Ku Klux Klan on the courthouse square, a decade before, that somehow I’d begun to link them with the burials. Those savage nights in a patch of firelight where familiar faces became those of strangers.

As the torches flared along the sidewalk, creating rickrack borders of red, Mr. Sam, our neighbor, jaunted out through the breezeway of the flat modern courthouse with his florid face lit by flames. Crossing the square of lawn to the pine platform, he struggled up with one hand on his knee while the crowd shouted for the election results.

Robert Dale laced his fingers with mine and squeezed; I returned the squeeze and wondered what kind of signal I’d sent. Neither of us had taken much interest in the election: Chester Hughes would serve as effectively as Spike Thomas for county commissioner. Emmett Allen would enforce our diluted laws as well as Sheriff Walker. Who cared? But shy as Robert Dale was, he loved a crowd, maybe because he could blend.

“Y’all hush up now, so I can give you what you come for,” hooted Mr. Sam through a megaphone of hands. His green plaid shirt took on a purplish tint in the reddish light. “Lemme see,” he said, squinting at the sheet of paper in his hand, then holding it up to a torch lifted to the edge of the platform. “Well, folks, looks like Sheriff Walker’ll be going back in.”

“Somebody put our some money!” a man behind me hooted.

The crowd clapped, a couple of them booing.

“Y’all reckon y’all can put up with old Spike a while longer?” Mr. Sam hollered above the racket, lifting both arms.

They clapped again, some of the torches floated off and back. A few disappointed sighs.

Robert Dale squeezed my hand again, and I looked at his radiant face, thinking how he didn’t really care, how he loved a winner, how I loved him. I wished he was my brother.

The crowd got restless during the announcement of the same old slate of names for board of education.

“Now, y’all have at ‘em!” Mr. Sam crept down from the platform with his shoulders scrunched as though to duck a hail of gravel.