A Southern Exposure (2 page)

Russ does not think so, nor does he see the link between his own famously intense, deep-set, dark blue eyes, and the small blue dots on either side of his daughter’s tiny nose.

“Handsome” is not a word generally applied to Russ; certainly he does not see himself as a handsome man—thank Christ! he might have added. His face is extreme, is
striking in its contrasts: very white skin and very dark, very thick curling brown hair, and those dark, dark intense blue eyes, so deep-set, so fierce. Wide thin red mouth, and deeply cleft sculptured white chin. A large, slow-moving man, Russell speaks slowly too, as though imitating the farm boy he used to be, and still claims as his true self (Russ has in fact several accents, or modes of speaking), so that the wild darts, sometimes lethal, from his intelligence elicit shock. Did Russ Byrd actually say that, just when you thought he was sleepily inattentive, even not quite catching on? Yes, Russ did say that, and those who read his poetry with any care found, buried in those rural landscapes, some messages that were somber indeed.

With the part of her mind that is not occupied with her screaming children (a large part), and her distant-seeming husband, Brett (SallyJane) Byrd considers Kansas. She compares Kansas to Santa Monica, the house just left behind, and she easily decides that of the two she likes it better in Kansas. She hated California: Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Palm Springs—all that she saw out there she disliked. All those furry-mouthed refugee intellectuals, so-called, and the fast-talking New York types—impossible to understand a word that anyone said. And all those skinny dyed-blonde women hanging all over the men with their boobs hanging out of their pale pastel silk clothes. The weather was pale and pastelly too, no zip to it, never a bite or scent in the air from anything real.

Whereas Kansas looks real, as real as hell. The way-off little farms, dirt farms, and dirt poor they looked to be; and the just plain miles and miles of nobody’s land, furze land, burned grassland. And every now and then on the highway a Model T, or an old-timey hauling wagon pulled along by a brace of mules. Sometimes whole families piled up on a wagon, with their beds and babies and everything, heading
to California to pick grapes, probably. Like in that new book, Mr. Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
, that Russ made her read. A lot of it made her cry with sorrow for those folk.

Of course Russ is driving too fast; he must be hitting sixty, anyway, so it’s hard to get a fix on anything she sees. She almost wishes that something would force them to stop, like an accident, or a vomiting child. She sighs as she thinks, Could I have wished that, wished sickness on one of the children? Oh, God will surely punish me for that. And then she smiles as she thinks, It’s good I quit going to church when I did.

“You dumb fool!”

“Melanctha is Alice the goon!”

“Justin is a doodoo.”

“Avery makes poopoo in his bed.”

The shrieks are laughter now, not tears, though it hardly matters, and at least no one is throwing up. Not yet.

Russell likes Los Angeles, Hollywood, all that, although back in Pinehill he pretends that he hates it. He even pretends with Brett, alone. But she knows better, she sees his face when the telegrams come, and the long-distance phone calls, summoning him out there. She sees that farm-boy smile spread from his mouth to his eyes, and when he gets off the phone to tell her what the plan is, she can hear it in his voice, pure pleasure. The country boy who’s won a prize at the fair. For his corn. (Brett snickers to herself at this very private joke.)

And the way he talks when they’re out there; it’s a scandal. His “ma”s and even “suh”s come as thick as summer rain, those mean little eyes of his opening wide and innocent, talking so slow and country it’s a wonder anyone can understand.

“But don’t you get worried at all? Russell meeting all those sex-queen movie stars and going to parties, swimming with them and all?” Several of the dumber women
in Pinehill have asked Brett that question, each phrasing it a little differently, but the message is always the same. Aren’t you jealous, aren’t you worried, and if you’re not, why not?

“Because I know Russ” is what Brett would like to say, to the nosey, fake-sympathetic, censorious ladies of Pinehill, and to some of the men. I know Russ; he’s scared to death of those real live movie stars. My Russ is a total coward when it comes to women. He was scared of me a long time ago, when I was the university president’s daughter, over in Hilton, and he was the scholarship boy, what was then called a “self-help” student, meaning that he waited tables in the dorm and took odd jobs on weekends. Russ was scared to death of me. I had to do almost everything to get him to look; I used to lie out sunbathing when he came over to fix a fence in our back garden, my fat breasts spilling out of my bathing suit, usually, and then I’d trot out lemonade and cookies to him (now there’s an original trick), and then it was me bought tickets and asked him to the May Frolics, and then the Sunday Germans. Pretty bold, I was, back then. But I really wanted Russell Byrd. I wanted a husband and a poet, and a father. I wanted Russ.

Russ is driving too fast. He is dying to get back home, Brett knows, just as when they’re heading west, to L.A., he’s dying to get out there. It’s always the next place, with Russ. The thing ahead. The new poem. The unborn child.

Too fast.

Sometimes beside the road there are people walking along, bums with their clothes on a stick—or, less frequently, women with kids. Farm women, from the look of them; gaunt and bony-faced, maybe heading west for some fruit- or some cotton-picking. They all look up as the big car passes them in the wrong direction, and then, seeing all the kids, sometimes they smile. You’ve got your troubles
too, is what Brett hopes they’re thinking, not just ugly mad jealous thoughts about rich folks in too large cars. “We’re not all that rich,” is one thing Brett would like to say to them. “But here, here’s what I’ve got in my bag”—and she imagines a flutter of dollar bills trailing after the car, a woman and child bending down to pick them up, and then going on walking to the next town for a couple of good big meals.

They now pass an enormous hay wagon, coming from the other direction, east. All the kids reach out; they believe that a piece of straw from a wagon like that brings luck. On the other side of the road, Brett’s side, she glimpses a tall thin person, she thinks a woman, in big dark clothes, and beside her something small and dark and round. A very small child, probably.

In the next instant several things happen: Russ swerves just slightly to the right, to avoid the hay wagon, probably (Russ is allergic to hay, a secret fact), the car bumps into something heavy, and two horrendous shrieks burst into the air, one obviously a woman’s, the other crazed, inhuman.

The car stops.

Russ opens the door, and in addition to the screams, which hardly stop, there is an explosion of foulness, a ghastly smell. Fecal—worse than fecal.

“Doodoo!” the kids all shout. “Throw up! I’m sick! Icky doodoo!”

“You kids just shut up!” shouts Brett, over all their voices, even as she thinks, I’ll cope with the kids, it’s all I can do, and more. Russ can deal with whoever he’s managed to kill.

It was not the woman. Brett now sees Russ rounding the front of the car, and the large dark woman moving toward confrontation, the woman no longer screaming but sobbing loud, holding a red bandana across her face—whether
to catch tears or to keep out the horrible smell, no one can tell.

Oh Christ, good Christ, he’s killed her child, thinks Brett. But why did the child smell so?

She can hear nothing of the interchange between Russell and the woman, can only see their impassioned pantomime; the anguished woman weeping still, implacable, so gaunt and tall—and Russ, in his gentle phase; Russ explaining, Russ very country charming. But his smile, is it possibly overdone? A dead child there in the road, and he smiles?

Another minute, and Russ walks around to the window on Brett’s side, and motions her to roll it down.

He whispers, “It’s her goddam pig.” He has said this too loudly for the children not to hear. “I’ve killed her damn pig, that’s pig shit you smell. Jesus Christ. Give me the money, will you.”

“Pig shit!”

“Daddy said shit—”

“Oooh—smell—”

This chorus comes from behind her as Brett reaches into the voluminous cracked patent-leather handbag that she insists on hauling around, as Russ puts it, including to Hollywood poolside parties. She pulls out some bills, not looking at them, not counting.

“That’s not enough. It’s the only pig she had, and it was very big. Her husband’s dead.”

Brett hands him more bills. She is unable not to think, Suppose it had been a child?

Out in front of the car Russ is immersed in further colloquy with the woman, who has now stopped her weeping. Who even looks at Russ with a semi-smile. And Russ, smiling too, is backing off. Even from this distance, through the bug-spattered windshield, Brett sees that he is pale and upset.
Poets
, she thinks, as she sighs and turns back to face her children.

“Look, you kids. Daddy feels very bad that he ran over the lady’s pig. He gave her some money to pay for the pig but he still feels very bad. So you kids just be quiet for a while, you hear?”

Melanctha, who, despite Russ’s theories, does in fact have a sensibility quite similar to his own, a delicacy of spirit, along with his eyes—Melanctha begins to cry, very quietly.

“Okay, Melly, you come up here with me. You sit on my lap. Darling girl,” her mother croons. “Don’t you fuss. For all we know pigs go to heaven too.”

“We’ll stop at a tourist court,” says Russ, getting back into the car.

“Really? I’ve always wanted to, I think they’re, uh, sexy.”

“Christ, Brett. Your mind. Or maybe we’ll stop at some house. You know, the ones with the lights and little signs on the lawn.”

“Tourist home. Overnight guests. Well, that’s okay too,” Brett tells him, thinking that it is considerably less than okay: in a tourist court the kids could have their own separate cabin, or maybe two cabins. And she and Russ could be—well, alone, for the first time in months, it seems to her. In the Santa Monica house the bedrooms were all strung out along a balcony, nice sunshine and ocean views but no privacy, none at all, not ever.

“Ursula.” Russ has said this name musingly, almost romantically.

“Who?”

“That was her name, the woman with the pig. Unusual, isn’t it? Wasn’t there an Ursula the Pig Woman in some play? Jacobean, I think. Maybe Johnson.
Bartholomew Fair
?”

“God, Russ, I don’t know.” Brett is experiencing a terrible and familiar sense of defeat.

•  •  •

That night in the large (six bedrooms) farmhouse that is now, in these hard times, a tourist home, Brett sleeps between Melanctha and Lowell, with Walker sprawled near their feet. Fitfully she thinks of home, of Pinehill, and their big spreading-out house. With the children off in their wing. Suppose the Depression got worse, and she and Russ had no money left, would they have to turn their house into a tourist home? Brett doubts it: “I’d rather dig ditches, I’d get me a job with the CCC” is what Russ would undoubtedly say. “No way strange folks are going to be sleeping over at our house.”

But he seems to enjoy it very much when they stay in those places. Tonight he has spent an hour or so after dinner, down in the living room, making talk with Mr. and Mrs. Williston, their hosts, a plump and red-faced couple (they look much alike), who visibly hang on Russ’s words, his stories. Not to mention all the time spent at the garage discussing their car; the pig had made serious dents in the right front fender, the garage was sending to Topeka for parts. And time visiting Ursula, the pig woman, from whatever play. Russ returns with stories of Ursula’s childhood, her husband’s death (TB), her seven children, all now grown. Her pig. Ursula is a fine brave woman, both Willistons confirm; they have known her always.

Indeed, Russ has seemed to settle into Kansas. Brett could easily imagine the two or three days becoming a week, and at that she thought, Oh good, I won’t have to go to the Hightowers’ party, and push off those stupid passes from Jimmy, and have those terrifying Hitler conversations with Esther.

Mostly, though, Brett is haunted by the child, the child who was not there but whom if he or she had been there, walking along with Ursula, instead of the pig, Russ could
have—he would have killed. Changing everyone’s life entirely. Irrevocably, for good. That nonexistent dead child is much more real to Brett than the vague seven live grownup children that Ursula actually has.

Instead of a dead child there was a big fender-bending shit-stinking pig.

Ursula the pig woman. Ursula the pig woman. A play of Depression Kansas. For the Group Theatre? Provincetown Players? Well, the thing is to write it, forget who for—for whom. And forget too the actual Ursula and her pig, and Kansas. A familiar but recently unavailable excitement trembles in Russ’s blood, and his face involuntarily smiles as he thinks, I could, no reason why not. It’s what they’ve wanted and kept saying I could do. An American classic. Folk but never folksy. I could do it.

He allows himself this moment of mindless excitement, of baseless confidence, silly joy—but only a moment, before he begins to think, But Jesus, the work, all the words, I’ll never be able.

Next he wonders if he gave Ursula enough money. Fifty bucks is a lot for these days, but it wouldn’t hurt to add a few bucks, maybe another twenty or so? What’s money for, anyway?

And how can he sleep with these kids all over him? Disentangling his legs from the warm, insistent arms and legs, Russ creeps from that bed toward the door to the hall, down which is the bathroom and presumably other sleeping quarters. But just as he gets to the door there is Brett, suddenly beside him, her hand on his arm as she whispers, very softly, “There’s another bed right next door. A nice big wide one. Want to meet me there?”

“But—” But he doesn’t, for so many reasons: one, a ravishingly beautiful girl named Deirdre.

“They probably hoped they’d rent it late tonight. Just lucky for us they didn’t.”