Chaneysville Incident (19 page)

I should have made the coffee stronger, or have had none at all: strong coffee would have made me feel closer to her, and none might have let me think of something else, but the weak brew simply made me understand how far I was from her; how far I was from anything.

I had brought him out at first light, as soon as I could see my way through the pines. I came out of the cabin, shaking with sleep and cold, and found that there would be no problem with the footing. For sometime during the night the storm had stalled; and now it hung there, caught in its opening phase. The clouds boiled aimlessly in the sky, the wind blew fitfully; the snow had stopped; the path had not become impassable. It made me want to laugh, and I did laugh, sending the sound out to die without echo in the brooding pines. Then I went back in and stirred up the fire and set the place to rights, washing the pots and pans and cups and bowls and spoons and placing them where he had always placed them. I put out the fire, and dressed him in his clean clothes. I put on my coat, and got him into his coat, and I carried him out.

I cradled him carefully as I carried him, protecting his arms and legs from collisions. It would have been a far easier proposition had I slung him over my shoulder, but I could not do that. And so the trip was difficult; I slipped to my knees countless times, and twice I fell heavily, twisting to take the impact on my back so as to spare him. I cried when my foot slipped and his shoulder struck a boulder; cried and told him I was sorry.

I brought him down the path and into the house that he had not entered in twenty years, and I set him in my mother’s parlor, in the chair that she reserved for the most favored of guests—the preacher and the presiding elder and, on one infamous occasion, one of Bill’s teachers—plumping up a feather pillow and placing it so that his head would not loll and cause a crick in his neck. I placed his hands on the chair arms. I straightened his shoulders. I lifted his feet and placed them on a hassock. Then I went into the kitchen and made two cups of instant coffee, brought them back and sat down on the floor beside him, holding my mug in both hands to absorb as much of the warmth as I could.

I sat there for a long time, sipping the coffee and listening to the sounds the house made—the creakings and the groanings of wood and rock shifting under the strain and cold, the high whining that the stove clock made when the gears got cold—and thinking about the countless little bits of lore he had imparted to me over the years, the trout and bass and catfish caught and cleaned and fried in sizzling bacon grease in black cast-iron skillets, the tender meat of young rabbit caught with handmade traps to avoid the necessity of digging shot out of the tender haunches, of the stories, told around a fire or in the darkness of the cabin. I finished my coffee, reached up and took the other cup and drank his coffee too.

That was how she found us. She didn’t say anything, she simply went to summon the coroner, acting as if getting up in the morning to find your sole surviving son sitting in the parlor in company with a stiffening corpse was an everyday occurrence. I didn’t say anything, either.

They came in a jeep since even the light snow had muddied the streets of the Hill, making it impossible for them to bring the dead wagon. They were soft-spoken and polite and did not laugh even though they were forced to drive away with him sitting up in the back seat, because rigor mortis had stiffened him.

When he was gone I went into the kitchen and sat down at the table. She was cooking eggs and bacon, wearing an old flannel housecoat over flannel pajamas, the sleeves of both pulled up and tied with remnants of cloth to keep them out of the range of the grease. The sound of the frying was almost musical, the smell warm and rich and enticing, and it was almost as it had been years before, beginning just after Moses Washington died, when I would rise with the dawn and come creeping down to the kitchen to sit at the table reading some book that I had probably read five or six times before, and an hour or so later, she would come down and we would talk as she would fry the bacon and crack the eggs and cook the oatmeal or the pancakes, and as I, feeling grownup and responsible, would slice the bread to make toast and siphon some cream off the top of the mason jar of raw milk fresh from Miss Minnie’s cow, and then go get Bill out of bed. A short interlude—ten minutes, fifteen—but, repeated thousands of times, it had made us close. Now she fried the eggs and the bacon, but the bread was presliced and the milk pasteurized and homogenized, and there was no Bill upstairs to be dragged kicking and screaming out of bed. And we didn’t talk at all until she gave me a cup of coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon and took her seat across from me with her own.

“It does me good to see you,” she said then.

I sipped at the coffee. “Good coffee,” I said.

“I don’t know that the preacher’s going to want to bury him from the church,” she said. “Hard to heat that place, this kind of weather, and oil isn’t cheap.”

“I’ll give him a check.”

“Oh, there’s no need for you to do that,” she said. “I just mean that the preacher’s a new man and all, and I’ll just have to explain who…” She stopped when she saw me staring at her. “What?” she said.

“You just love arranging burials, don’t you?” I said. Her jaw tightened. I sipped my coffee.

“Anyway,” she said after a minute, “there’s no need for you to pay for anything. I suspect the County’ll pay for the funeral. They ought to. He never would take a penny from relief. Too proud. I’ll say that for him, that man was proud.”

“The only way they would pay is if he was on relief. Then he would have been a good darky, taking handouts from Massa. The way he was, the only way the County would pay to bury him is to have him hauled away in a garbage truck.”

She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “He paid his insurance, you know that. I’ll call the agent this morning. I can do it from work.”

I stared at her again. “Why do you want to do it? You didn’t give a damn about him when he was alive.”

“He helped build the house I live in. He was my husband’s friend. He was my son’s friend. I didn’t want to rub elbows with the man, and I won’t say I’m going to cry a tear over his smelly carcass, but I’m not so quick to forget I maybe owe him a thing or two.”

I didn’t say anything; I just looked at her.

She sighed. “You want more coffee?”

I nodded. She poured it, sugared it, added too much milk. That was the way she had done it the first time she had let me drink coffee. It had been a rather momentous morning; the two of us in the kitchen as always and then suddenly she, with no fanfare, with an almost elaborate casualness, putting a cup beside her mug and pouring it half full. She meant it as an entry into her world, and it might have worked had it not been for the fact that, long before, Old Jack had initiated me into manhood with a sip of a far more potent brew. But she did not know that, and it did not seem to me then that I had to choose one or the other, and so I sipped my coffee-milk elaborately, flaunting it in front of Bill, and floated off to school, swollen with my new status. Predictably, I stood up to some taunt and got into a fight, for once giving as good as I got. They called her to the school. She chastised me in the principal’s office, while that gentleman looked on in stern satisfaction.

“You’re going to be
persona non grata
if you keep up this fighting,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” I mumbled.

“Speak up when you talk to me,” she snapped. “And show some respect. Do you know what
persona non grata
means?”

“No, ma’am.”

The principal leaned forward.

“It means that people don’t want you. It means they won’t talk to you or be with you. It means there won’t be a soul you can trust. Folks won’t have anything good to say about you.”

The principal sat back, looking relieved; he hadn’t known what it meant, either.

I had been staring at the floor, because it was impossible to look her in the eye when she spoke that way and looking anywhere else but down would have been a sign of impertinence. But her words kindled something inside me, and I raised my head and looked her straight in the eye. “Well, then, I guess I’m person-whatever-it-is already. Because that boy called me a nigger. So I might as well fight.”

For a moment she stared at me, speechless, and then she brought her hand around in a long sweeping curve that ended just above my left ear. The room spun. My head rolled on my neck, swinging up towards the ceiling. Somehow I stayed on my feet, brought my head under control, forced my eyes to focus. She stood looking at me, waiting to see what I would do. I smiled at her. She hit me again. In the moment before the blow landed I saw the look on her face; it was cold, determined, almost murderous. And then the world spun. I literally saw stars. But I stayed on my feet, stumbling a little, yet somehow keeping my balance. I did not look at her face again; I kept my head down.

“He won’t be gettin’ into no more fights,” I heard her say, through the slowly fading ringing in my ears. “If it’s all right, I just take him on home and clean him up, send him back this afternoon.”

“That’s fine,” the principal said.

She had turned to me, tugging at my collar points. “Let’s get you home and clean you up.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

We left the school and walked the half block to where she had parked the car. I got in and sat silently, staring straight ahead. I ached. They had been tough fights. She got in, started the engine. Then she turned to me. “John, don’t you forget, don’t ever forget, that white people are the ones that say what happens to you. Maybe it isn’t right, but that’s just exactly the way it is. And so long as you’re going to their school, so long as they’re teaching you what you need to learn, you have to be quiet, and careful, and respectful. Because you’ve got your head in the lion’s mouth. You understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I had said.

She rose from the table and took her mug to the far end of the kitchen and set it on the windowsill while she unshipped the iron and the board. She sipped absently at the coffee while she waited for the iron to heat. “It almost seems like I ought to be going up to shake your brother awake. That boy sure did love his sleep.” She took a sip from her mug, then tested the iron with the moistened tips of her fingers. She pulled a blouse from the laundry basket by the door, spread it on the board, took another sip from the mug, set it down, and began to iron. She would, I knew, forget about the coffee. She always did. She would get engrossed in whatever it was and forget the half-full cup, and when she wanted more coffee, she would make a cup of instant, eventually leaving that one too somewhere half drunk. Hours, sometimes even days, later she would find a cup and take it up again, never minding the fact that the coffee was cold now. That’s what she was trying to do now—take it up and carry on like it was only cold coffee.

“Yeah,” I said. “He sure did love his sleep.”

She looked up at me, still ironing. “I…” she said, and stopped.

“You what?” I said, realizing my slip as soon as I said it: I had given her permission to say whatever it was that she was going to say.

“I always wish we could have talked more about your brother. About him dying.” She did not look up. The iron moved slowly and evenly across the board.

“There wasn’t anything to talk about. He died.”

“And you still hate for it.”

I saw the trap then. “Not now,” I told her. “I’m tired now.”

“Now is the only time. You’ll be on that bus and we’ll never talk. Because the only thing that brought you back here was that old man. You leave now and I’ll never see you again.”

I looked up at her. There wasn’t any pleading or pain in her eyes, and the iron moved as evenly as ever: it had been only a statement of fact. “What,” I said, “do you care?”

“You’re my son. The only child I’ve got left.”

“That’s not my fault,” I said.

“Meaning it’s mine.” She did not look up then, either.

“Not now,” I said.

“Well, that is what you mean, isn’t it?”

She was winning again, and I knew it, and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t keep myself from putting the coffee down and saying, “Fact: when he left me he had a thousand dollars and a bus ticket to Montreal. Fact: he came here in the dead of night to say goodbye to you. Fact: in the morning he was down there in town, and they were so good to him they let him enlist. Fact: he went off and died. Summary: he left me to live and he left you and died. Now, Mother, exactly what was it you wanted to talk about?”

“I guess I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. The iron moved over the cotton blouse in slow smooth even strokes.

“Well, that’s just as well. Because I don’t.”

“And you don’t want to.”

“Not a whole hell of a lot, no.”

“Don’t you
talk
like that in my house,” she snapped. “I raised you right; I raised you to show more respect. And let me tell you, what he wanted to do was
wrong.
Running away! That boy had a future, and he was ready to throw it all away, running off to Canada….”

“Good future he’s got now.”

“You don’t know. There were good people in this town that wanted to see him do well. And he still had a chance. You don’t know how I begged Mr. Scott. They were going to put that boy in jail. Son of mine in
jail.
So I begged him. Pleaded with him. And so they gave my boy a chance….”

“Yeah,” I said. “To die for them.”

“To do right,” she said. “To do his duty.”

“The only thing I want to know,” I said, “is did you talk him into giving up, or did you just turn him in?”

She was silent. And still. I waited, and presently I saw a curl of smoke rising from the blouse; her hand no longer moved the iron. I didn’t say anything: I let it burn. After a moment she became aware of it. She moved slowly and deliberately, without haste or panic, lifting the iron and carrying the smoldering cloth to the sink, dousing it with water. She held the burnt blouse up to the light, looked at it. “I have to go to work,” she said. She had put the blouse down and vanished up the back stairs. For a few minutes I had heard her rattling around up there. I listened to her footsteps moving across the floor as she went about the business of dressing. I listened carefully, waiting for her to go into her powder room, where she had always kept the keys to the car. Finally I heard her steps going in there, caught the faint jingle of keys. And then I knew that I had perhaps touched her just a little; I heard her come down the stairs at the front of the house. The front door slammed. The car started, idled for a moment, and then churned away, down the Hill.