All the Days and Nights (47 page)

Austin King’s house was clearly our house, to anyone who had ever been in it. In 1912 Hattie was across the street at my Grandmother Blinn’s. But during the visit of my Great-Aunt Ina and her family Hattie was working in our kitchen. However, I never had it in mind to write about her. Rachel, the colored woman who worked in the Kings’ kitchen, was imaginary. Insofar as she was modeled on anyone, it was the West Indian maid of a family in New York I came to know years later. They lived in a big old-fashioned sunless but cheerful apartment off upper Madison Avenue. The front door was never locked, and I used to open it often when I was a solitary young man. I forget whether Renée came from
Haiti or Guadeloupe. About her private life I knew nothing whatever and I don’t think the family she worked for did either.

In a run-down part of Lincoln I once saw a railroad caboose that had come to rest on concrete blocks, in a yard littered with cast-off objects that were picturesque but of no value: a funeral basket, a slab of marble, a broken-down glider, etc. Rachel had to live somewhere, and so why not here? Her five children were not all by the same father but they were all equally beautiful to her. She was easygoing, and perfectly able to be a member of the family one minute and a servant the next, but nobody owned her or ever would. None of this corresponds in any way with the little I know about Hattie Dyer’s life and character, but I am afraid that is beside the point. In an earlier, quasi-autobiographical novel, thinking that my father and stepmother would probably not be comfortable reading about themselves, I made the protagonist’s father a racetrack tout living far out on the rim of things, and an elderly friend of the family said disapprovingly, “Why did you make your father like that?” So perhaps there is no way to avoid or forestall identifications by a reader bent on making them.

When I was working on the novel about the Kings, it did not occur to me that Hattie would read it or even know it existed. A few women who had known me as a child would put their names on the waiting list at the Lincoln Public Library, one or two at the most might buy it, is what I thought. Men didn’t read books. The
Evening Courier
and the Chicago
Tribune
supplied them with all the reading matter they required.

Early on in the writing of the novel the characters took over, and had so much to say to one another that mostly what I did was record their conversation. The difference between this and hallucination is not all that much. One day a new character appeared, and inserted himself retroactively into the novel. He came on a slow freight train from Indianapolis. “Riding in the same boxcar with him, since noon, were an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy, and neither of them ever wanted to see him again. His eyes were bloodshot, his face and hands were gritty, his hair was matted with cinders. His huge, pink-palmed hands hung down out of the sleeves of a corduroy mackinaw that was too small for him and filthy and torn. He had thrown away his only pair of socks two days before. There was a hole in the sole of his right shoe, his belly was empty, and the police were on the lookout for him in St. Louis and Cincinnati.”

On the night of the party, while Rachel was still at the Kings’, he appeared at her house and frightened all the children, one of whom was
his. Rachel was not totally surprised when she walked in on him. She had dreamt about him two nights before. When she realized he was not just after money but meant to settle down with them she took her children and fled. I was frightened of him, too, even as he took life on the page. For a week he stayed blind drunk, and as I described how he lay half undressed on a dirty unmade bed, barely able to lift the bottle to his mouth, I thought
Why not?
and let the fire in the stove go out, and the outside door blew open, and in a little while he died of the cold he had stopped feeling.

I have no reason to think that Hattie’s husband, Fred Brummel, was anything but a decent man. My mother’s statement that Hattie was having trouble with him possibly amounted to no more than that they were of two minds about moving to Chicago. If Hattie did indeed read my book then what could she think but that I had portrayed her as a loose woman and her husband as a monster of evil? And people in Lincoln, colored people and white, would wonder if I knew things about Fred Brummel that they didn’t, and if he was not the person they took him for. I had exposed their married life and blackened his character in order to make a fortune from my writing. I was a thousand miles away, where she couldn’t confront me with what I had done. And if she accused me to other people it would only call attention to the book and make more people read it than had already. If all this is true (and my bones tell me that it
is
true) then why, when I walked into my aunt’s kitchen, should she be pleased to see me?

I do not feel that it is a light matter.

Any regret for what I may have made Hattie feel is nowhere near enough to have appeased her anger. She was perfectly right not to look at me, not to respond at all, when I put my arms around her. I must have seen Fred Brummel at one time or another or else why does his name conjure up a slight, handsome man whose skin was lighter than Hattie’s? If, now, I were to go out to the cemetery in Lincoln and find his grave (which would take some doing) and sit beside it patiently for a good long time, would I learn anything more than that dust does not speak, to anyone, let alone to a stranger? He was once alive. He married Hattie and they had several children. That much is a fact. It does not seem too much to assume that he was happy on the day she told him she would marry him. And again when he held his first child in his arms. And that he was proud of Hattie, as proud as my father was of my mother. Who are now dust also.

M
Y
older brother and I shared a room when we were children, and he was so good at reading my mind that it left me defenseless against his teasing. When I learned something that the family was holding back from him and hadn’t considered it safe to tell me, either, my first thought was
He will see it in my face!
But by that time he and I were living in different parts of the country and seldom saw each other, and from necessity I had acquired, like any other adult, an ability to mask my thoughts and feelings. His life was hard enough as it was, and there was no question but that this piece of information would have made it more so. The older generation are all dead now, and what they didn’t want my brother to know would still be locked up inside me if my brother’s heart hadn’t stopped beating, one day in the summer of 1985.

The firm mouth, the clear ringing voice, the direct gaze. In a family of brown-eyed or blue-eyed people his eyes were hazel.

As a small child — that is to say, when he was five years old — he was strong and healthy and a holy terror. Threats and punishments slid off him like water off a duck’s back. My father, with the ideas of his period, believed that children should learn obedience above everything else, but he was new at being a father, and besides, three days a week he wasn’t there. My mother was young and pleasure-loving and couldn’t say no to an invitation to a card party, and often left my brother with the hired girl, who was no match for him. He was named Edward, after my Grandfather Blinn. My father’s sister christened him “Happy Hooligan,” after a character in the funny papers, and part of the name stuck. “Look out, Happy, don’t do that!” people shrieked, but he had already done it. One afternoon as my mother emerged from the house dressed fit to kill, he turned the garden hose on her. My Aunt Edith, hearing the commotion,
opened the screen door and came out to see what was going on, and she too got a soaking. My brother continued to hold the two women at bay until the stream of water abruptly failed: My father had crept around the side of the house to the outdoor faucet. My brother dropped the hose and ran. At that time, my Aunt Annette lived farther down the street and if he got to her he was safe. She was not afraid of anybody and would simply wrap her skirts around him and there he’d be. She was upstairs dressing and heard him calling her, but by the time she got to the front door my father was holding him by the arm, and possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Down through the years, when family stories were being brought out for company, someone was bound to tell the incident of the garden hose, and about how my father’s cigars had to be kept under lock and key.

All such outrageous behavior came to an end before Hap had reached his sixth birthday. The year was 1909. My Aunt Annette, driving a horse and buggy, stopped in front of our house. There was something she wanted to tell my mother. As they were talking my brother said, “Take me with you.” Annette explained that she couldn’t but he seldom took no for an answer, and started climbing up the back wheel of the buggy in order to get in beside her. She finished what she had to say and flicked the horse’s rump with her whip. I was a baby at the time and there is no way I could remember my mother’s screams, but even so I am haunted by them.

My brother’s left leg was amputated well above the knee. At some point in my growing up I was told, probably by my father, that if the surgeon had been able to leave three or four more inches of stump it would have made a considerable difference in my brother’s walking.

By the time I was old enough to observe what was going on around me, my brother had an artificial leg — of cork, I believe, painted an unconvincing pink. When I opened my eyes in the morning there it was, leaning against a chair. I had no conscious feelings about it. It was just something my brother had to have so he could walk. Over his stump he wore a sort of sock, of wool, and the weight of the leg was carried by a cloth harness that went around his shoulders. In the evening after supper my father would give him lessons in walking properly: “If you will only lead with your wooden leg instead of dragging it behind you as you walk, it won’t be noticeable.” This was
almost
true. But when Hap was tired he forgot. It has been more than seventy years since we were boys together in that house, but my shoulder remembers the weight of his hand as we walked
home through the dusk. If he saw someone coming toward us, the hand was instantly withdrawn.

I
N
the earliest picture of my brother that I have ever seen, taken when he was a year old, he is sitting astride Granny Blinn’s shoulders. He was her first grandchild and the apple of everybody’s eye. As soon as he was old enough to walk he wanted to be with the men, where the air was blue with cigar or pipe smoke and the talk was about horses and hunting dogs, guns and fishing tackle. Between my Grandfather Blinn and my brother there was a deep natural sympathy — the old bear with the cub he liked the smell of. In my mind I see my brother sitting in the front seat of a carriage, studying now the details of the harness on the horse’s back and now my grandfather’s face for a response to what he is telling my grandfather. And being allowed to hold the reins when they came to a place where the horse was not likely to be startled by any sudden movement from the side of the road. At a very early age he resolved to follow my Grandfather Blinn into the profession of law, and he never deviated from this.

He was nine years old when my grandfather died. My grandmother died that same year, and the house was sold to a family named Irish, from out in the country. They had three boys and a girl, and Mrs. Irish’s mother lived with them. I think it is more than likely that before the moving men had finished carrying the Irishes’ furniture up the front walk and into the house Hap and Harold Irish had sized each other up and decided it was safe to make the first move. As it turned out, they were friends for life. Harold was a sleepy-eyed boy who noticed things that other people missed. My brother preferred his company to that of any other boy he knew. Harold understood, without having to be told, that my brother could not bear any expression of pity or any offer of help. With intelligence and skill he circumvented his physical handicap. My father and mother never made anything of this, but they cannot have failed to notice that there was very little other boys could do that Hap couldn’t do also.

On October afternoons while the maple leaves came floating down from the trees, the boys of the neighborhood played football in a vacant lot on Eleventh Street. The game broke up when they couldn’t see the ball anymore. With a smudged face and pieces of dry grass sticking to his clothes, Hap would place himself on the crossbar of Harold’s bicycle,
which was always waiting for him. He had a bicycle, and could ride it, but to do this with security and élan you need two good legs. Hashing over plays that had miscarried, they rode home to Ninth Street. If other offers of a ride were made, my brother declined them.

In winter when it was still dark I would be wakened by the sound of gravel striking against the window, and Hap would get up from his warm bed and dress and go off with Harold to see if they had caught anything in the traps they had set at intervals along Brainerd’s Branch. They had learned from an ad in a boys’ magazine that you could get a quarter for a properly stretched and dried muskrat skin, and they meant to become rich. If they waited till daylight they would find their traps sprung and empty. Other boys — coal miners’ sons from the north end of town, they believed — also knew about that ad. More often than not it was bitterly cold, and to reach the pasture where the traps were they had to cope with a number of barbed-wire fences half buried in snowdrifts. I am sure, because I used to see it happen on other occasions, that Harold climbed through the barbed wire and walked on, leaving Hap to bend down and hold the wires apart and pull his artificial leg through after him. My mother was forever mending rips in his trousers.

The summer he was fifteen he and I were sent to a Boy Scout camp in Taylorville, Illinois. With the whole camp watching him he climbed up the ladder to the high-diving platform, his cotton bathing suit imperfectly concealing his stump, and hopped out to the end of the board and took off into a jackknife. His life was one long exercise in gallantry. He wanted to make people forget he was crippled — if possible to keep them from even knowing that he was. He wanted to be treated like anyone else but behaved in such a way as to arouse universal admiration. Not leading with his artificial leg but dragging it after him across the clay court, he won the camp tennis singles. It is no wonder so many people loved him.