3 Day Terror (10 page)

H
E USED
to wake up in a sweat from that dream, a cold sweat that left him shivering on his pallet, and whimpering until Tappie, his grandmaw, who some said never slept, closed her eyes but was always awake her whole life, crawled across to him and took his skinny boy’s body into her own thin and bony frame, and said: “Hush up, nigger boy. You wake your daddy up, he go’n tan your brown hide till the blood flow like water outa de white folks taps.”

He used to tell her about the dream and she used to tell him back, “Next time someone yell dat to you when you’s dreaming, yo’ say back in de dream dat you know for a fact it ain’t no white woman you’s fallin on, it’s a white cushion, big as a wagonfull of cotton and just as soft. And you go right on falling, boy, but don’t be wakin’ up and cryin’ out when yo’ daddy got to be up at quarter to six.”

Turner used to think about the dream over the years. and remember the fear; and he used to marvel at the fact that as a kid he’d feared hurting a white woman more than smashing his bones on concrete; and that as a man, flying with the 332nd Fighter Group, after the attack on the bloody Anzio beachhead, when he managed to extricate himself from his wildly diving plane, and get his parachute open, he thought the crazy ironical thought:
Stop, Rastus,
floating down the three thousand feet in the gray overcaast, dizzily bobbing with his feet dangling,
“You’ll land on top a white woman.”

That Saturday morning, hurrying from his store down on Rex Road behind the Bastrop Feed Company, on his way to Porters’, the dream came to his mind once more, after a long hiatus during which he had managed to save, and to swing a bank loan, to set himself up in the grocery business, and to realize a certain satisfaction in his means for livelihood; one he never knew before. And now the first threat to that security — what Doris had told him over the telephone — and along with it, the dream, re-remembered.

In Bastrop they say the Negroes smell smoke first; say white folks can tell trouble coming by the Negroes going; that it seeps into white folks’ awareness in the same slow way air seeps out of a tire; that the Negroes are going straight to the Nelly after work, and that the door those nights in the Nelly are shut to the outside, and the inside is dark. Watch out if Negroes don’t loiter during a noon hour down by the Wheel, the whites say; and wonder, when the Negroes don’t make town of a. Saturday, in slow, ambling, easy-laughing groups. The Negroes are quicker when the air is ominous, and they are quieter. And some say their eyes move differently when they know a danger; say a Negro can’t keep his eyes averted from a white’s then, but in one, fast, and impulsive glance up, meets the white man’s look head-on, for one split second of his black eternity, and that is the siren, his eyes seeing yours, some say — that is the whistle screaming
caution.

But sometimes long before all of this, some more subtle sign may show itself, and a white hand may pause at work to scratch the white head and wander, like Jack Chadwick — watching Turner Towers from the window of the
Citizen
:

“How come Turner’s taking off work right at noon hour when he’s busiest?”

Then shrug and forget.

And less curiously, more politely, another in the town may notice — Senior Porter — on his way to his car out in front of Porter Drugs: “Well, now, Turner, how come you’re taking off, hah? Must be you’re a boy doing yourself ho-kay, hah?”

“As a matter of fact, sir, I’m on my way to your place. Have to see my wife for a bit.”

“Good enough. Come on, drive along with me.”

Turner could wonder at his own vulnerability to the least sign of trouble; could and did feel the familiar irritations mount in him now as he got into the black Plymouth on Court Street; thought, and knew as he thought, that he was thinking like a Negro now — the first admission to himself he saw the smoke signs clearly marked, decimating the man, personalizing Color, making stripes in the front seat, black and white:

Thought: You’re a boy doing yourself ho-kay; naw, I’m a man, Mr. Porter, black as your counter top and grubbing for my collard greens, and my wife scrapes your dishes and burns your trash, and we live in the Nelly with the rest of the niggers; got our B. A.’s from Talladega tacked up in our outhouse.

Thought: passing the Wheel on the way up Franklin, “I know your boy well, Mr. Porter; met him in Cannes at a rest resort for soldiers. A French boy went to the trouble of bringing us together ‘cause he knew we were from the same home town; surprised us, Mr. Porter, out on the porch, Troy in a wheelchair there. French boy said, “You two didn’t even know you were in the same hospital! I knew you’d be surprised to see each other! I’ll leave you alone,” the French boy said, “you’ll have a lot to talk about …” I guess we talked and laughed for hours, Mr.

Porter, Troy and me. We couldn’t get enough said about Bastrop … And after the war I saw him in your place, one night, saw him with Miss Poppy, as he introduced her. He said, “Miss Poppy, this is the colored boy I was telling you about — that I met in Cannes. Name’s Turner,” he said. Said if I ever wanted an odd job for some extra money, I should look him up; they had a boy to cut the lawn, but he made a mess of hedges. Said was I good at hedges?

Thought: passing the Episcopal Church on Allen, Senior Porter humming along with the radio: Tired of having no last name, and only one age — boyhood — nigger never gets to be a man; and thought: got to get a grip; maybe not as bad as it sounds; maybe everything going to be ho-kay, like Mr. Porter say; Lord, pray, Lord.

“Well, here we are, boy,” Senior Porter said as they swung into the gravel drive. “Whoop, there’s Duggan on the steps. Must be another crazy message from Mrs. Gus.”

“Yes, sir,” Turner said, getting out of the car on his side.

Senior Porter walked around to the front of the house and Turner went over to Duggan.

“Let’s see it,” he said.

“Now, you listen, Turner, ‘fore you git mad. I was only gonna tease Ginny Lee Polk Ann. You know I soft on dat sister yours. I wasn’t meaning anythin’ at all, Turner.”

“Duggan, this hasn’t got anything to do with you and Ginny. I just want to see that pamphlet and hear where you got it.”

Duggan bit into an apple he was holding; talked with his mouth full, chewing: “Got it from a man we picked up by the Dip. Had car trouble. I had to git in his car to git it started, and I sees the pamphlet, s’all. So I says, maybe like I’ll play a joke on — ”

Turner held his arm down so Duggan could take another bite.

“Where is it?” he said.

“Doris snatched it from me. Saw it hanging outa my pocket when I come to bring de note from Mrs. Gus. She got it.”

Turner went up the steps and through the screen door. His wife stood by the stove.

“On the table,” she said. “Looks like Council or Ku Klux.”

“Because of Monday.” Turner said matter-of-factly, walking over to the dinette.

“Under the toaster, Turner. God, I hope it doesn’t start up.”

“And Duggan said there was a meeting out there?”

“Suggs, Beggsom, the Chandlers — all of them, and this man in the car.”

Turner studied the front:

“Don’t know the man’s name or anything about him?” Turner asked, leafing through the pamphlet.

“Duggan said he was from up North.”

Turner Towers frowned. “From up North? That don’t make sense!”

“There’s something else,” his wife said, “something I didn’t tell you, Turner, This morning,” she began, “Reverend Forsythe stopped by with Miss Poppy. He called Mr. Jack about a man who’d picked him up — same place, out by the Dip — and he said — ”

They were interrupted by a sudden burst from the dining room, Gay Porter laughing: “Hoooooo, gaw, law-gaw, Senior, Lettie-Lou Chandler is plumb cuckoo! Now, you just listen here to what this says — ”

“Go on!” both men said to their wives.

W
HERE
we going, Mom?” the small boy asked. “Don’t stand on the seat when I’m driving, Pryce!” she snapped. “I’ve told you that time and time again and you don’t pay any attention!”

“But where we going?” he slid down and sat sulking beside his twin, May B., who was turning the pages of a Golden Story Book.

May B. whined: “Pryce always stands up.”

“Both of you be quiet!” Poppy Porter told them. “I don’t know where we’re going,” she said, but she had known since the roadster passed the Wheel on Court Street that she was going to see Jack Chadwick.

She insisted to herself that she did not have to analyze her reasons for taking such a step, and yet at the same time she analyzed one possible reason out of existence. Her visit had nothing to do with Dee’s return. She had no curiosity to see for herself how Chad was taking it. This, she told herself, was the farthest thing from her mind that Saturday afternoon. And so was anything and everything that had happened between Jack and herself.

Still, a gap of five years had never actually been bridged. It had remained by mutual consent — as tacitly understood as it was understood not to refer to the past, not
that time
in the past, anyway, when Poppy was chasing Chad. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind — not even in Poppy’s — that “chasing” was the only word to describe it.

It irritated Poppy, to this day, whenever she and Troy were out on a party, or over at the Yellowhammer, or down in Porter Drugs, that Troy would place his hand on her somewhere — perhaps press her thigh, under the table, or touch a finger to her wrist, or move his palm gently against her back — as a signal that Chad and Cass were on their way to join them momentarily, to chat briefly for a time. It was a signal, Poppy knew, and it was intended as a tender gesture of sympathy, she supposed, perhaps completely unconscious on Troy’s part; still she never failed to flinch inwardly when it happened. It seemed to her preposterous for Troy to want to remind her, or offer her solace after all those years. And equally preposterous, that between Chad and herself there existed some sort of desperate politeness, a screen of solicitous discretion, as though each one were forever skirting an issue as embarrassing as a recent death, hereditary insanity, or hemorrhoids.

In the back seat, as the roadster turned down West Tennessee, the twins were fighting over the Golden Story Book, and Poppy could feel impatience well up in her. She tried to temper it with the thought that they were too young to know what was happening, but when Pryce thrust a hand holding a silver pistol over the seat, and said: “Tell me why we’re stopping here, or I’ll blast you!” she literally shrieked: “Because we
have
to stop here, Pryce!”

And that much was true, she decided. It was not, as it may have seemed, such a random decision to go to Chad, though she knew as well as she knew her husband, that Troy, when he heard about it, would say, “I wish you’d think things through, and not always act on impulse.”

Cutting the motor, she felt in her bag for a dime to put in the meter. “I want you and May B. to wait in the car,” she said. “And I want you to behave. Please.” Through the rear-view mirror she saw Pryce slouched in the corner, frowning, his fingers pulling at his lip, the same hurt expression covering his countenance that showed on Troy’s face whenever he was offended.

Like last night, driving home from the Yellowhammer, after she had remarked: “It was Dee who hurt Chad, Troy,” when they were discussing Dee’s return, “not the other way around. Chad wouldn’t hurt anyone intentionally.”

Sulking, he had said, “He didn’t hurt you?”

“I hurt myself,” she had lied. “Chad never let me think for a minute that he’d marry me — or that he even cared for me, for that matter.”

Somehow it always gave her more satisfaction to pretend that Chad hadn’t led her on. It made her seem more noble to have loved a man who would not purposely deceive her, for even though love exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, as beauty does, the beholder rarely wants to admit myopia. Confirmation of the prize helps, and since there was no one in Bastrop to confirm that Poppy had a prize in Jack Chadwick — for everyone knew he saw her only in the blinding light of the torch he carried for Dee — Poppy herself had to lie before others, to save her self-respect.

And every time she did it, Troy sulked, because it was such an obvious lie.

“I want to go back and see the circus at the Wheel,” May B. spoke up.

Pryce said, “So do I.”

“It isn’t a circus,” Poppy told them, getting out of the roadster.” Now, you all behave, hear?”

“What is it, then?” Pryce said. “There’s a whole crowd.”

“There’s a whole crowd,” May B. echoed him. “There’s a whole crowd.”

Poppy said. “It’s a gathering. Just some people who are going to listen to a speech.”

“I want to go and shoot them!” Pryce cried out.

Poppy said, “So do I, Pryce.”

“Then, let’s!” he waved the silver pistol triumphantly.

“Put it away,” Poppy told him. “Now, I won’t be long. You all behave.”

May B. said, “Pryce always stand up on the seat, doesn’t he, Mommie. Just like a coward!”

Dropping the dime in the meter, Poppy tried to think where her daughter heard that word. Then she remembered: Yesterday afternoon the twins were playing on the porch when Troy was discussing his opponent with the men up from Montgomery.

“Polk just pussy-foots around the whole issue of integration,” Troy had said. “Lord, you’d think he was running for the United States Senate, ‘stead of the State of Alabama’s. Well, I got him there. He’s a coward, s’all.”

“What’re you going to say?” one of the men had said, mopping his brow in the heat and chewing on the soggy end of the smoked-down cigar, “That’s still a big issue, Troy.”

“Not for a State Senator. Hell, I’m going to say just what the Alabama’ motto says: We Dare Defend Our Rights.”

“Good point!” the man said, “just quote the motto. Sure that’s the motto?”

• • •

Poppy glanced at her reflection in the plate glass window of the Fair-Deal Furniture Store, next to the
Citizen.
She wished she didn’t look quite so tacky; wished she’d known when she left the house this morning to pick up the twins at her in-laws’, that she was going to call on Chad — but that was like someone wishing they had thought to bring an umbrella on one of those utterly sunny summer days, when a sudden unexpected downpour caught them unaware. She would have liked to be wearing a dress; but she was wearing her years-old dirndl skirt, and the mended nylon blouse; and she would have liked to be wearing heels, but in her effort to try and be punctual — Gay Porter had some kind of fetish about people being on time — she had slipped her feet into a pair of scuffed loafers.

Plain tacky, she thought, as her hand touched the doorknob of the
Citizen’s
office, and for the first time since she had made the decision to come here, she regretted it. She thought of going home and changing first, or of calling Chad from home, even though the way she looked shouldn’t have anything to do with what she was seeing him about.

Then Chad’s voice voided any impulse she had to turn back.

“Poppy!” he was smilinag, standing in the hallway outside his office. “Nice to see you.”

She saw his hand shut the door behind him, and she said, “I came to see you about something important, Chad.”

“I saw you pull up,” he answered.

They stood there some slow seconds, facing one another — she waiting for him to ask her into the office, and Chad waiting for her to continue.

Finally, Chad said, “We’re in a rush. Office is all messed up. Poppy.”

“I won’t take much of your time.”

“Good!” he said so emphatically that Poppy Porter looked up into his eyes; and he turned them from her and glanced over at the wall where there was a bulletin board, with farm prices pasted to it. He said, “I don’t mean that I wouldn’t spare you all the time you needed, Poppy, any day but today. I — right now — I got to take care of something. Something come up.”

She felt better then. Perhaps he already knew. “You know what’s going on down at the Wheel, Chad?”

“Is something going on down there?”

“There’s a stranger in town — ”

He interrupted her. “Yeah, Jud called me from Senior’s. Some crackpot.” His tone was curt, restless.

“It’s more serious than that,” she said. She saw his fumbling impatience with her; saw it and couldn’t help remembering when he used to complain: “God almighty, Poppy, you take so damn long to say anything! Can’t you talk any faster than you do!” That recollection confused her all the more, and triggered a whole series of memories that she kept forcing off her mind’s screen, as she stood there in the hallway, wishing to God she hadn’t come here; beginning to realize for the first time that she was nothing but a source of angry embarrassment to Jack Chadwick; that traces of the same widely unreasonable agitation which he had shown with her toward the end of their affair, were evident now. Poppy could feel the heat rise in her cheeks, and she knew her face was that ugly red color that came whenever she felt humiliated.

“Well, what
is
it, Poppy!” He let his annoyance show clearly for the first time; then sighed, “God, I don’t mean to be short with you, Poppy, but things are in a state.”

Poppy let the words rattle out of her like keys clicking out exercises on a typewriter machine: “This stranger is stirring up trouble, Chad. I came to you because Troy is down in Montgomery and I didn’t know who else to come to. Right now at the Wheel there’s a crowd and he’s down there, this stranger that Jud picked up on the road, down there talking against integration. I passed him in the car on my way here. There’s a lot of people, Chad, people from all around Tate County, it seems, and he’s down there — ”

Again, Jack Chadwick interrupted her. “Poppy, why did you come to me?”

She looked at him incredulously. “W-what?” For one split second she lost all track of the reason she
had
come; couldn’t remember that she had come because Chad seemed the only logical person in Bastrop to tell, because she
knew
Jack’s stand on integration, because she had spent a summer defending his editorials before Troy and her father; couldn’t remember any of that, but could just stand there looking at him, close to crying, the way it used to be whenever Jack reprimanded her over the slightest little thing she’d said or done.

He said, “I’m not the law, Poppy.”

“I know that,” she answered; thinking what made me think I could bridge that gap, walk from then to now without falling on my face? Thinking: I’d forgotten what it was like — the then. Forgotten the way Chad could look at me like I was dirt.

“Poppy, look, I’ll look into it, all right? I’ll take a walk over there later and see about it, okay?” His hand behind him groped for the doorknob to his office.

She said, “I just came from Dad’s,” reaching trancelike into her bag for the piece of crumpled paper. “This was in their milk bottle this morning.” She held it out to him.

Jack took it, and frowning, tearing the paper in his hurry to open it, said, “Let’s see here — ”

But the tears in Poppy’s eyes were too close to spilling over, the hurt and shame too urgent for her to contain much longer.

She said, “Maybe it’s nothing, Chad. I have to run anyway. The twins are in the car out front.”

As she turned and started out the door, she heard Chad answer: “I’ll look into it, Poppy. I promise, gal,” and his voice had that high, nearly giddy tone, of sudden, welcome relief.