A Spool of Blue Thread (41 page)

At such moments he would run his mind back through that long-ago trip to the train station, this time doing it differently. Down the dark streets, turn right past the station, turn right again onto Charles Street and drive back to the boardinghouse. Let himself into his room and lock the door behind him. Drop onto his cot. Fall asleep alone.

J
UNIOR HAD EUGENE
take the porch swing down to Tilghman Brothers, an establishment near the waterfront where Whitshank Construction sent customers’ shutters when they were so thick with paint that they resembled half-sucked toffees. Evidently the Tilghman brothers owned a giant vat of some caustic solution that stripped everything to the bare wood. “Tell them we need the swing back in exactly a week,” Junior told Eugene.

“A week from today?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Boss, those fellows can take a month with such things. They don’t like to be hurried.”

“Tell them it’s an emergency. Say we’ll pay extra, if we have to. Moving day is two Sundays from now, and I want the swing hanging by then.”

“Well, I’ll try, boss,” Eugene said.

Junior could see that Eugene was thinking this was an awful lot of fuss for a mere porch swing, but he had the good sense not to say so. Eugene was an experiment—Junior’s first colored employee, hired when the draft had claimed one of the company’s painters.
He was working out okay, so far. In fact, last week Junior had hired another.

Linnie Mae had been worrying lately that Junior would be drafted himself. When he pointed out that he was forty-two years old, she said, “I don’t care; they could raise the draft age any day now. Or you might decide to enlist.”

“Enlist!” he said. “What kind of fool do you take me for?”

He had the feeling sometimes that his life was like a railroad car that had been shunted onto a side track for years—all the wasted, wild years of his youth and the years of the Depression. He was lagging behind; he was running to catch up; he was finally on the main track and he would be damned if some war in Europe was going to stop him.

When the swing came back it was virgin wood—a miracle. Not the tiniest speck of blue in the least little seam. Junior walked all around it, marveling. “Lord, I hate to think what-all they must have in that vat,” he told Eugene.

Eugene chuckled. “You want I should varnish it?” he asked.

“No,” Junior said, “I’ll do that.”

Eugene shot him a look of surprise, but he didn’t comment.

The two of them carried it out back and set it upside down on a drop cloth, so that Junior could varnish the underside first and give it time to dry before he turned it over. It was a warm May day with no rain in the forecast, so Junior figured he could safely leave it out overnight and come back the next morning to do the rest.

Like most carpenters, he had an active dislike of painting, and also he was conscious that he wasn’t very good at it. But for some reason it seemed important to accomplish this task on his own, and he worked carefully and patiently, even though this was the part of the swing that wouldn’t show. It was a pleasant occupation, really. The sunlight was filtering through the trees, and a breeze was cooling his face, and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was playing in his mind.

When he was done, he cleaned his brush and put away the varnish and the mineral spirits, and he went home for supper feeling pleased with himself.

The next morning he came back to finish the job. The swing was dry, but a fine dusting of pollen was stuck to the underside of the seat. He should have foreseen that. No wonder he hated painting! Cursing beneath his breath, he dragged the drop cloth toward the back porch with the swing along for the ride. Then he spread another drop cloth inside the enclosed end of the porch and hauled the swing in and set it right side up. This was going to be done properly, by God. He tried to forget how the lower surfaces of the armrests had rasped against his fingertips when he grabbed hold of them.

Eugene had painted the back porch interior earlier in the week, and the smells of paint and varnish combined to make Junior feel slightly light-headed. He drew the brush along the wood with dreamy strokes. Wasn’t it interesting how the grain of the wood told a story, almost—how you could follow the threads and be surprised at how far they traveled, or where they unexpectedly broke off.

He wondered if someday Merrick would be proposed to in this swing, if Redcliffe’s children would swoop back and forth in it so raucously that their mother would seize the ropes to slow it down.

After Junior learned how a man could feel about his children, he had conceived a deep and permanent anger toward his father. His father had had six sons and a daughter, and he’d let them loose easier than a dog lets loose of her pups. The older Junior got, the harder he found it to understand that.

He made a quick, sharp, shaking-away motion with his head, and he dipped his brush again.

This varnish was the color of buckwheat honey. It drew out the character of the wood and added depth. No more of those eternal
Swedish-blue swings of home! No more raggedy braided rugs and rusted metal gliders; no more baby-blue porch ceilings that were meant, he supposed, to suggest the sky; no more battleship-gray porch floors.

Linnie was going to start up the walk on moving day, and at the foot of the porch steps, “Oh!” she would say. She would be staring at the swing; one hand would fly to her mouth. “Oh, why—!” Or maybe not. Maybe she would conceal her surprise; she might be crafty enough. Either way, Junior himself would climb the steps without breaking stride. He wouldn’t give a sign that anything was different. “Shall we go in?” he would ask her, and he would turn to her and gesture hospitably toward the front door.

There was a satisfaction to imagining this scene, and yet he felt something was lacking. She wouldn’t fully realize all that lay behind it: his shock at what she had done and his outrage and his sense of injustice, and his hard work to repair the damage. Eugene’s trip to Tilghman Brothers, the exorbitant fee they had charged for the expedited service (exactly double their regular fee), Junior’s two separate trips to apply the varnish and the final trip he would make Friday morning to screw the eyebolts back in and reattach the ropes on their figure eights and hang the swing from the ceiling: she would have no idea of any of that. It echoed the pattern of their lives together—all the secrets he had kept from her despite his temptation to tell. She would never know how deeply he had longed to free himself all these years, how he had stayed with her only because he knew she would be lost otherwise, how onerous it had been to go on and on, day after day, setting right what he had done wrong. No, she had absolute faith that he had stayed because he loved her. And if he told her otherwise—if he somehow managed to convince her of his sacrifice—she would be crushed, and the sacrifice would have been for nothing.

He circled each spindle with his brush, smoothing varnish into each joint, tracing the crevices of the lathing with tender, caressing strokes.

On Friday when he went back to hang the swing he took along more boxes from home and a few small pieces of furniture—the play table from the children’s room and the little chairs that went with it. Might as well haul as much as possible over ahead of time. He parked in the rear and carried everything in through the kitchen and up the stairs. While he was up there, he indulged himself in a survey of his new property. He stood at the hall railing to admire the gleaming entrance hall below, and he stepped into the main bedroom to gloat over its spaciousness. His and Linnie’s beds were already in place—twin beds, like those the Brills had had, delivered last week by Shofer’s. Linnie couldn’t understand why they didn’t keep on sharing their old double, but Junior said, “It just makes more sense, when you think about it. You know how I’m always tossing and turning in the middle of the night.”

“I don’t mind you tossing and turning,” Linnie said.

“Well, we’ll just try this out, why don’t we. We’re not throwing the double away, after all. If we change our minds we can always move it back in from the guest room.”

Although privately, he had no intention of moving it back. He liked the
idea
of twin beds—their Hollywood-style glamour. Besides, he’d spent enough of his childhood sharing a bed with various brothers.

In the far corner of the bedroom stood the Brills’ armoire, which he also considered glamorous. It made his cheeks burn, though, to remember that he had first understood it to be called a “more.” “Mrs. Brill,” he had said, “I hear you’re not taking your more to the new place. You think I could buy it off you?”

Mrs. Brill’s eyebrows had knotted. “My—?” she said.

“Your more in the bedroom. Your boy said it was too big.”

“Oh! Why, certainly. Jim? Junior was just wondering if he could buy our armoire.”

It wasn’t till then that Junior had realized his mistake. He was furious at Mrs. Brill for witnessing it, even though he had to admit that she had behaved very tactfully.

In a way, it was her tact he was furious at.

Oh, always, always it was us-and-them. Whether it was the town kids in high school or the rich people in Roland Park, always someone to point out that he wasn’t quite measuring up, he didn’t quite make the grade. And it was assumed to be his own fault, because he lived in a nation where theoretically, he
could
make the grade. There was nothing to hold him back. Except that there
was
something; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. There was always some little tiny trick of dress or of speech that kept him on the outside looking in.

Nonsense. Enough. He owned a giant cedar-lined closet now that was meant for storing nothing but woolens. The wallpaper in this bedroom came all the way from France. The windows were so tall that when he stood at one, a person down on the street could see from the top of Junior’s head almost to his knees.

But then he noticed a patch of blistered paint at the corner of one sill. The Brills must have left that window open during a rainstorm. Or else it was the result of condensation;
that
would not be good.

Also, the wallpaper underneath it was showing its seam too distinctly. In fact, the seam was separating. In fact, where the paper met the sill it was actually curling up from the wall a tiny bit.

Saturday was the day he went around giving estimates; that was when the husbands were home. So he didn’t stop by the new house. He wrapped up his appointments early, because tomorrow they were moving and there was still some packing to do. He got home about three o’clock and walked on through to the kitchen, where he found Linnie pulling cleaning supplies from the orange crate under
the sink. She was kneeling on the floor, and the soles of her bare feet, which were facing him, were gray with dirt. “I’m home,” he told her.

“Oh, good. Could you reach down that platter from up top of the icebox? I clean forgot about it! I like to walked off and left it.”

He reached for the platter on the refrigerator and placed it on the counter. “I’ve half a mind to take another load to the house before it gets dark,” he told her. “It would make things that much easier in the morning.”

“Oh, don’t do that. You’ll wear yourself out. Wait for tomorrow when Dodd and them get here.”

“I wouldn’t take the heavy stuff. Just a few boxes and such.”

She didn’t answer. He wished she would get her head out of the orange crate and look at him, but she was all hustle-bustle, so after a minute he left her.

In the living room, the children were piling up empty cartons to build something. Or Merrick was. Redcliffe was still too little to have any plan in mind, but he was thrilled that Merrick was playing with him and he staggered around happily, dragging boxes wherever she told him to. The rug had been rolled up for the move and it gave them an expanse of bare floorboards. “Look at our castle, Daddy,” Merrick said, and Junior said, “Very nice,” and went on back to the bedroom to change out of his good clothes. He always wore his suit when he was giving estimates.

When he returned to the kitchen, Linnie was packing the cleaning supplies in a Duz carton. “Mrs. Abbott’s husband said no to half the features she was wanting,” Junior said. “He went straight down the list: ‘Why’s
this
cost so much? Why’s this?’ I wished I had known he would do that way before I went to all that trouble with my figures.”

“That’s a shame,” Linnie Mae said. “Maybe she’ll talk to him later and get him to change his mind.”

“No, she was just going along with it. ‘Oh,’ she said, all sad and mournful, each time he crossed something off.”

He waited for Linnie to comment, but she didn’t. She was
wrapping a bottle of ammonia in a dish towel. He wished she would look at him. He was starting to feel uneasy.

Linnie Mae wasn’t the type to shout or sulk or throw things when she was mad about something; she would just stop looking at him. Well, she would look if she had some cause to, but she wouldn’t
study
him. She would speak pleasantly enough, she would smile, she would act the same as ever, and yet always there seemed to be something else claiming her attention. At such times, he surprised himself by his urgent need of her gaze. All at once he would realize how often she did look at him, how her eyes would linger on him as if she just purely enjoyed the sight of him.

He couldn’t think of any reason she would be mad at this moment, though. He was the one who should be mad—and
was
mad. Still, he hated this feeling of uncertainty. He walked over to stand squarely in front of her, with only the Duz carton between them, and he said, “Would you like to eat at the diner tonight?”

They seldom ate at the diner. It had to be a special occasion. But Linnie didn’t look at him, even so. She said, “I reckon we’ll have to, because I took everything in the icebox over to the house today.”