“I was.” My voice slid higher, in the forgotten alley-tones of home. “I’d got some money, I had. I was going to knock, I was. Quite a bit of money I’d got, and I thought … I’d got three dollars.”
His face looked so queer that I stopped. It moved like a cat’s, separate on its neck. He threw the bucket of swill over me.
It was like being spat upon, although I had never been. But there are postures the spine is born knowing. Reproach for the unknown is one of them.
“Spend your money in niggertown,” he said. “Like Lemon.”
The sour stuff seeped down me, teaching me in one minute the nakedness of clothes. And there on the nail was the note that revealed me. I sprang for it.
I had it in my hand when he jumped me. We rolled over and over, kicking and tearing, sobbing deep in our chests with the grim joy of having found the adversary at last.
He was kneeling on my chest when he read it. I lay on my back, heaving slower, the arm that he had twisted outflung. Soft air currents in the night touched my eyelids, that all but closed in sleep. Filth from my hair trickled into my mouth, but I did not move; it had the taste of justice. It was he who bent and wiped it away.
“Stay here,” he whispered, and went off into the dark. When he came back he had a bucket of water and a cloth. He stood me up and cleaned me off like a brother.
“Turn around,” he said. When I had my back to him he spoke, dipping and wringing the cloth. “They been writing stuff on the windows—know what I mean?”
I nodded, head down.
“Pick times when I ain’t here,” he said. “Sure ’nough don’t pick times when I’m here.” The rag paused, continued its work. “Store closed early tonight. Semple has places ’round town I got to go for him. He let me take his car.” I heard the note of pride, but more than that the way he was telling me things in the present, the way he had never done before. “Runs like a dream, she does,” he said.
He mopped the back of my jeans. “Brung it back for him, walk home slow, never thinking anybody try any that stuff tonight. Ain’t even been in the house yet—come round the corner, and I seen you.” His hand paused again, and I felt the water run down my calf to my heel. “Nobody comes here for
me
, see,” he said. “Took you for one of them, see what I mean?”
I turned so that I could look down on him as he squatted there, dangling the rag. “What I meant—about the money—”
“Forget it.” He found a spot on my sneaker.
“What I—”
“I said forget it.” He wet the spot down carefully. “Your maw—she in on your asking me up to your house?”
I had forgotten her. “She’s gone off,” I muttered.
He looked up. “For good?”
That is the way I remember his face best—when he looked up and said that. There was all his life and what he came from—in the way he said that. And it was odd how I wanted to be able to say yes to him, the way an aggrieved child sometimes tells the neighborhood that he is the adopted son of his true parents.
I hesitated, seeing the rising kinship in his face. When I lie, it is not as a fantasist, but to see if I can change life, to play with the protean gap between what is and what might be. And when I tell the truth, it is not for moral reasons, but because I am impelled to see what life does when it is left alone.
“She and my uncle—they went to Memphis for a week,” I said.
“Oh.” He flipped the bunched rag from hand to hand. He had not, then, been asked into a house after all, as the Nellises had once asked him—as shone always in his mind, like their evening light. Yet when he stood up, he put an arm on my shoulder, for what he presumed to be my trouble. “’On’t you fret,” he said. “’On’t you fret on it.”
“I’ve no need to fret,” I said, and it was true, for the moment. We reconsider our troubles, and are helped to bear them, in proportion to their seeming like blessings to others. He had shown me the difference between us.
“They got married today,” I said. “Down at the church, this morning. Maybe you heard.”
“Town had bigger news this morning.” He had withdrawn his arm; he was not too dull to see what I was doing. For now that I had a piece of his mystery, how quick I had been to use it against him, to do to him what I feared from others.
It made me bolder. “The money was to last me the week, but I’ve enough stuff to last me at home. And what I’d in mind was—you and me … we might go down to the café.” Even as I said it, it struck me—how the image had come to be. Not as I had dreamed it—never as one dreams it. But it had come to be.
“Café’s closed,” he said, staring. “Won’t be no trade there tonight, don’t you know that? Your folks crazy, leaving you run loose tonight?”
“I walk late in the backs lots of times.”
“You come through the backs?” He blew out his breath. “Reckon I better see you safe home.”
“How come it’s all right for you?”
He cocked his head, listening. “Shhh. Ain’t that the sound of cars?”
The whistle-stop signal, where we stood, was south of where the town streets ended. The main line ran north-south on the western edge of the town. Behind us to the west were the fields across which I had come, beyond them the backs. All of Tuscana, except for niggertown, lay east of us and the main line, in a hollow bordered on the other side by the state road, four miles away. Between us and the state highway there was a curving dirt road that dead-ended here. To the north, overlooking the town, was the hill where Johnny and I spent our afternoons—one of the small moraines that marched across country here like fragments of aqueducts, marking the dry lizard-trail of some dead tributary of the wide waters farther east. Beyond the hill—in a great easterly semicircle enclosing us all: Tuscana, Charlotte and its sister town of Denoyeville—were the dam sites, breastworks that neither fought us nor defended us, and advanced without guns. On clear nights like this they rose like frozen tidal waves, darker than the sky.
We listened, and heard the sound of motors approaching up the dirt road. There was as yet no surfaced route between us and the dam site. All its exodus was from the other side. Yet, as I listened, I imagined that somehow a detachment of its trucks had overleaped its fortifications, for the sound we heard was in unison—the low humming of motors going at a slow, set pace, on work operation. Then the first car came into view, and close behind it another and another and another, until finally we could see the whole long motley string, moving in low gear, creeping toward us at parade pace—all the cars of Tuscana.
“What they come this way for?” Johnny whispered. “Weren’t due to pass this way.”
“What? Who?” I whispered back. He hushed me, pushing me behind him with a warning hand, then drew me with him inside one of the sheds. Its door hung askew from one hinge, an old kitchen door with a rotted tuft of curtain at its window and no pane.
All the cars were in view now, each pinpointed in the light of another, in a semicircle around us, down the road for as far as we could see. There must have been about forty of them. To own a car was still an eminence in the town at that time, and none of them was new; they were sold and acquired locally as horses had once been, each car with a personality, with a history of the fall and rise of its successive owners, with all its bloodlines clear in the mind of the town. As they rounded us, I thought I recognized farm trucks seen week after week at the Friday market, others that were a familiar sight on the streets, although I could not name their owners, and a few that I was sure I had never seen before, that might have come from Denoyeville or Charlotte. I recognized the Baptist minister’s car, and the doctor’s.
They came on, at a steady pace of about eight miles an hour, to the hum of the throttled engines, and there was something disturbing about the evenness with which they came. The lead car drew up and halted a few yards from us; behind it the others also halted. The lead car turned off its lights, but not its engine. One by one the others followed, and the sky came out again, with the pallor peculiar to a clear night’s zenith, above the long dark line that stood stock-still in the road, its engines urgently throbbing, its gas-generated breath rising toward us like the musk of a waiting herd. Inside where we were the curtain stirred with it, the shed spread it like a sieve.
“Who they come by for?” muttered Johnny. “Nobody supposed to be here I know of. Everybody supposed to round up in town.”
He dug his fist in my arm for silence, to keep me where I was, and stole outside. I peered after him through the curtain, my heart pounding with the question of who they might be, that dark, animal line. But deeper still—favoring even then the mystery of the one over the many—I brooded on how it was to be Johnny, for whom home was a place where anyone, any time, might be there.
When the gas lay so heavy on the wind that it seemed a word, a movement would spark it, the door of the main shed opened and was quickly closed. It was Frazer, the watchman, carrying his lantern, lifting it once broadly up and down, so that the whole swollen front curve of him showed, dropsical belly to crotch, making its childish, self-important “Oyez” in the dark. Behind him the other man, the long-chinned man from inside, seized the lantern and put it out.
At once all the headlights went on, paired by paired eyes springing open. In their glow I saw Johnny’s face where he lay all but hidden in the long grass. He was staring at the lean figure of the second man. The man’s long jaw caught the light as he handed the doused lantern to old Frazer and took out the makings of a cigarette. He shook out the tobacco and licked the paper, his feet still half strutting in their buck and wing, and now I could hear the tune they jaunted to—“Old Zip Coon”—and catch the words he hummed.
Went to the river and I couldn’t get across
,
Paid a silver dollar for an old bline hoss—
He lit the cigarette, laid a hand on Frazer’s shoulder, and pushed past him.
Hoss wouldn’t foller
,
so I swapped him for a coon
,
Coon began to holler
,
so I went back home.
I watched Johnny as the long figure slouched past him unaware, almost catching his face with its heel, and slid, easy-loined, into the first car of the line. He was staring up at it with the same look that, earlier, swinging the bucket, he had bent on me.
I crept out to him and crouched at his elbow. He did not turn his head to acknowledge me. “Never knew he came up here,” he whispered. “Could have sworn he never hung around with
them.
”
I said nothing. I did not consider telling him what I had overseen of the man and old Frazer and his mother, of the familiar way they had been sitting at table, of how the man had replaced the round comb in her hair. Nor did I think of whispering to him, friendly helpful, friendly deceiving, that perhaps he was wrong about the man, whoever he was, the way he had been wrong about me. I knew better. Already, out of my innocence I was forming my own peculiar honesty, as each of us, not out of original sin—that I deny—but out of our innocence, is forced to do. I knew that one may only gather the threads, and be silent. I knew that nothing one says face to face avails.
We were crouched there when the lead car moved in a direction so unforeseen that we barely had time to flinch into the shadows. This was the end of the road; the line must turn around, each car in its own radius, unless it planned to go in reverse the whole four miles to the state highway from which it must have come. Behind us was the siding. Beyond it there was no road, only the rough fields across which I had run from the backs.
But the lead car moved forward, turned sharply and made for the siding. I saw the car’s hood tilt up and heave ahead under the fever-shine of the signal, and I recognized it as Semple’s, hearing Johnny from times past:
A Packard eight. He got it off a widow in Mobile. Hundred-forty-five-inch wheelbase
,
longest wheelbase made. Has a fourth gear hauls it out of a ditch like a tractor. Brewster body. Custom-built for a man six and a half feet tall.
Behind it, each car wheeled sharply and made for the main-line crossing. As they passed, here and there I thought I recognized cars Johnny had described or pointed out to me, repeating their dossiers in longing or condemnation. It took about twenty minutes for them all to cross over. Now and then a truck moved out of line to help a weaker car over; once an old touring eight, wedged on a timber, needed the help of two. But in all the pushing and grinding no human arm appeared, no voice, no driver. It was like watching a fable of cars changed to beetles, turned masters. At the finish, shell ranged by glittering shell, they were all on the other side. Behind them the signal light, some switch tripped or wire crossed, began blinking. Then the lead car struck out alone straight across field, grinding like a tractor over hummock and stubble, making a path for the rear to follow, and in a long, transverse line, single in the starlight, all the cars of Tuscana crawled forward, humming, into the backs.
When they had gone, Johnny turned to me. Under cover of the noise we had gradually been drawn to our feet, shoulder to shoulder, away from the sheds. The smell of the grass rose again, that meek smell which will inherit the earth. All was quiet now around us except for the signal light, beating on. It went on like a warning pulse, although no train would pass here until dawn.
“So you come through the backs,” he said. “See anyone there.” It was not a question. Then he knew I had not.
I shook my head.
“You fool,” he said. “You poor dumb fool.” But his eyes, shining, looked past me.
He seized my wrist suddenly and dragged me forward. “Come on! I’ll see you home.”
He led me north on the lane that met the first streets of the town, and all the way along he hurried me, goading me like a child on its way to be punished. We went almost at a trot down the shrubbed lane, and all the way, as I panted to match my stride with his, I could feel his anger growing, clotting.
In front of my house we stopped short, both of us winded. He faced me, breathing harder than I. I thought he was going to jump me again—me, or whomever, in his fury, I stood for. This time I held my ground, lifting my chin to look at him eye to eye. Then I saw that his eyes were full of tears.