Original Sins (6 page)

How was he supposed to pick up and leave everything? Just because
she
wanted him to, just because it was convenient now to have him around, like a cat or a dog or something. It was too late. She wanted him in New York City. What about what
he
wanted? Had she ever considered that in her whole entire life? He crumpled the letter and hurled it to the sidewalk again and place-kicked it into the gutter, then whirled around and stalked home.

He switched on the evening news and collapsed into an old brown armchair in the dark living room. Grease was crackling and flying in the kitchen where his grandmaw was concocting supper. On the television screen some colored people in their Sunday clothes sat at a lunch counter having ketchup dumped on them by a bunch of white people who was angry about something or other. His grandmaw emerged and switched off the set. “What you doing, Grandmaw? I'm watching that.”

“Donny, honey, I don't like you watching that stuff. I don't want you getting no smart ideas.”

“I got to watch it for Civics. It's our assignment.”

“Humph.”

“What ideas you afraid I'll be getting?”

“Donny, you growing up to be a fine proud colored man. You do like the white folks says and you be all right. They treat you just fine. All this yelling and carrying on—it ain't

right. The Lord don't like it. You got to learn to be a clever nigger. You clever enough, you gets what you wants without you cut nobody up.” She spat a wad of tobacco juice across the room into a coal scuttle. Donny had learned to take this feat for granted.

“Aw, Grandmaw, I ain't gonna cut nobody. Turn that thing back on.”

“Honey, you don't know what you likely to do when you gets growed.” And finds out what you up against, she added to herself as she returned to her hot plate and started turning over chicken wings. She munched her tobacco thoughtfully. She'd never known the best way to raise up children—to tell them right from the start how mean-spirited some folks was, or to protect them for long as you could. You had to teach them to mind their manners, or else they'd get smart and get into trouble. But it was downright pitiful to watch them frown and try to understand things even their parents had a hard time understanding. Kathryn's Buddy was raised to think he could do pretty much anything he pleased. He came home from that war over at France in a big fancy yellow car with a lot of flashy clothes. He had a photo of hisself setting in a bar with his arms around some French girls, white girls they was. He used to pull it out all the time. “That nigger's gon get hisself killed,” she used to mutter to Kathryn. To him she'd say, “Buddy, honey, you in Newland, Tennessee, now, not Paris, France.” Kathryn thought he was just about the most wonderfulest thing she'd ever laid eyes on, and she up and married him fast as she could.

Then they all had to sit there on their porches and watch as he tried time after time to find and keep a job. His car and clothes got more and more shabby. One day he got all dressed up in his best sharkskin suit and went downtown to apply for a janitor job over at the Parkway Department Store. As he strutted across the street, this white man who was painting the lines of the crosswalk with two other men stood up and painted a yellow line down the back of Buddy's suit. Buddy stood there trembling, clenching and unclenching his fists. He said he knowed if he used his fists, he was as good as dead. So he burst into tears. The white men laughed. A couple of weeks later he robbed a store, got caught and sent to prison. One day he was found in his cell with his throat slashed. In one hand he clutched a weapon—a sock with the toe tied to a padlock. He left Kathryn pregnant with Donny.

Ruby sighed. But if the good Lord had meant for life to be easy, He wouldn't of made people all different colors to start out with.

Through her almost closed eyelashes, by the flickering candles on the coffee table, Sally could see the other Devouts sitting on the couch and the chartreuse carpet of Diane's living room. Judy, the Devotions Deputy, her eyes tightly shut and one hand fingering the gold cross hanging from a chain around her neck, was asking the Lord to bless the football team in the upcoming game against the Bledsoe Station Bulldogs. Diane added the Student Council officers and the principal to the blessing list.

Not to be outdone, Judy intoned, “We ask you, Lord, to bless our Mayor, Mr. Prevost, and to bless our congressmen and senators from the State of Tennessee. And most especially we ask you to bless President Kennedy, even if he is a Catholic.” Judy closed with the special Devout Prayer:
“Help us, Lord, in every way / To do Thy will day by day. / Pure in body, mind, and soul, / Working toward our heavenly goal.”

“Amen,” agreed the eleven Devouts. Normally there were twelve Devouts, the number set to correspond to the number of disciples. But one Devout, now an ex-Devout, had just been bundled off to an aunt's in Richmond to await the birth of her illegitimate baby. They joined hands for a silent prayer, as the Devout handsqueeze was passed lingeringly from member to member.

Sally tried to think about the Lord, but her thoughts kept straying to Jed and their fight at the quarry that afternoon. She had told him to keep his hands above her waist and outside her madras dress.

“Now, I think that's fair, Jed honey. That means we can do whatever we want above the waist and outside the clothes.”

“Fair? You call that fair?” He folded his muscled arms and leaned against his door. “All right, it's a deal if we say above the waist but inside the clothes.”

“No. Absolutely not.” Sally studied the gold-plated megaphone on her charm bracelet.

“All right, Sally. We'll try it your way. No hands below the waist, or inside the clothes. No hands anywhere. No nothing.” He ran his hand up the front of his flat-top.

“All right. That suits me just fine.” She leaned against her door and stared out at the walls of limestone all around them.

Jed started the car. “Where are we going?” she asked nervously.

“I'm taking you home.”

“Home? Why?”

“Ain't no point in us setting out here in a gully if you don't want to do nothing.”

“But I do, Jed. I want to hold you and kiss you. I want us to talk about what we did today. I just don't want all that other stuff.”

“Well, holding and kissing may be what you want, but it ain't enough for me.” He gunned the Chevy onto the dirt road, the tires throwing up clouds of dust and gravel. “You get me all worked up, and then you get offended if I try to do anything about it.”

“Are we breaking up then, or what?” she inquired.

“I'll go with you to the Sadie Hawkins Dance like we agreed. But I ain't touching you no more, Sally. That should make you real happy. I'll find me some girl who'd like to be touched by Jed Tatro. Lots would, you know.”

Tears welled up in Sally's eyes. Jed threw her a look of hatred and pleasure.

Just thinking about it, Sally felt the tears massing again. It was so hard to know what to do. She liked to kiss and hug, but that was never enough for Jed. He wasn't even very interested in kissing, it seemed to her, did it just to get her to relax so that he could slip his hands under her shirt or up her skirt. She had developed the ability to kiss him with one eye open, keeping track of his hands and directing them to the agreed-upon areas. She had also developed the ability to shut down any creeping sensations of enjoyment that might interfere with these powers of surveillance.

She loved Jed. At least that was what she heard herself telling him one night in his car at the Wilderness Trail Drive-in as the fog swirled around and obscured the screen. She wasn't sure what that word meant. It had a lot to do with not wanting to be alone on Saturday nights. But she didn't see why telling him that meant that suddenly he could do whatever he wanted with her body. She had thought nice girls didn't do what he wanted her to do. But he insisted that the difference between nice girls and not-nice girls was that not-nice girls talked about what they did, whereas nice girls just did it.

She knew that women were supposed to do whatever they could to please men. When her daddy came in from the mill, she jumped up so he could have his favorite overstuffed brown leather chair. She brought him the newspaper, switched the television to the news. In contrast Emily sat where she was, nodded, and went on with whatever she was doing. But Sally loved doing these things. Her daddy worked hard all day for them. He deserved to be catered to when he came home tired and hungry. Her mother often brought him supper on a tray, so that he wouldn't even have to move. He said that Southern women treated their men like kings; that if word got out, the South would be flooded with men from every other part of the country.

Here was Jed asking her for something that would please him very much. How could she deny it to him? But how could she grant it either, knowing how her daddy would feel about it? And she certainly didn't want to get into the business of deceiving her daddy. Whenever Jed came to pick her up, he'd try to be polite and pleasant. But her daddy, usually so well-mannered, would either ignore Jed, or grunt a reply, or get up and walk out. Sally couldn't figure it out. Several times when she and Jed had broken up, she'd dated other boys. Her father had always asked, “What does his father do?” But he
knew
what Jed's daddy did, had known the whole family for years. So what could he have against Jed?

In any case, there was no way to please both Jed and her daddy at once on this issue. But she couldn't bear the thought of losing Jed to some girl from Cherokee Shoals who would give him everything. Why, the idea of seeing him with another girl was too repulsive. She'd kill herself first. Why couldn't he be content just to hold her and kiss her and talk? She felt no compulsion to do more than this, and she couldn't understand this urgent neediness he was always referring to. Was it true that boys had savage lusts they couldn't control?

Diane turned on the lights, blew out the candles and passed around butterscotch brownies. Sally dried her eyes as the others discussed whom to invite as their twelfth member.

“I think Louise is real devout.”

“But she smokes.”

“That's right. She does. We don't want any smokers in Devouts.”

“How about Laura?”

“
Laura?
Laura Owens?”

“Sure. Why not? Laura loves the Lord.”

“That's not all Laura Owens loves. So I hear.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Just that she's got a bad rep. She's not really Devout material.”

“And you are, I suppose?”

“Well, I'm here, aren't I?”

“Just barely. You just barely made it, Clara, and if I was you, I'd watch my step.”

“Watch my step! Who do you think you are? You can't kick me out of this club!”

“You may be a member, but you're not an officer. And you never will be, at the rate you're going….”

Jed sauntered into the house. Raymond looked up from his study of the chart on the living room wall. Next to it hung an embroidered sampler that read: “Do nothing you wouldn't want to be doing when Jesus comes.” Jed's chinos bulged at the crotch. “And how
is
our Sally?” Raymond asked.

Jed looked confused, then blushed, smirked, and sat down on the sofa, covering his lap with a pillow and running his hands against the front of his flat-top. “She's all right.”

“Well, I'm just delighted,” Raymond drawled. “It does my little old heart good to know that Newland's own Miss Sally Prince is all right.”

“Whadaya got against Sally?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She's just not my type.”

“Well, you're not her type either.”

“What a convenient arrangement. The Lord does look out for His own, doesn't He?”

“But she still likes you. I can't imagine why.”

“Well, I like Sally, too,” Raymond said wearily, returning to his study of the family tree. “Well, Mother!” he yelled. “I see you've finally done it!”

“Done what, Junior honey?”

Raymond scowled. He'd finally gotten everyone to call him Raymond except his parents and his relatives in Tatro Cove.

“I see you finally traced our line back to Jesus.” He laughed silently.

“You hadn't oughta talk like that, Junior,” she called in a hurt voice from the kitchen where she was cutting out biscuit dough. That Junior worried her to death with his lack of respect. Always arguing with his father and taking the Lord's name in vain. She didn't know what would become of him when he left school at the end of the year. With that smart mouth of his, he'd never be able to hold a job. Her own parents had moved into Newland from a mountain farm when she was ten. Her father was a drunkard and her mother supported them all by turning their home into a boarding house for newly arrived mill workers. She'd been working all her life—first on the farm, then helping her mother with the boarders, then shift work at the mill, and now as secretary to Mr. Sutton at Sutton Insurance. He was the best agent in the office, and all the other girls looked up to her. She wore a hat and white gloves to work now instead of coveralls, and sat at a desk with a fresh flower in a bud vase. All this effort to get where they were, with a house and a car and all the food they wanted, and Junior took it for granted. Seemed like that he thought it all fell from the sky. It scared the wits out of her to think he'd take after her own father and look to the rest of them to carry him.

“Shut up, Raymond,” Jed muttered from the couch. “Don't joke about Mama's tree thing. You know it means a lot to her.”

“But not to me,” Raymond replied as
he
headed for his room. “Why she wants to keep track of a bunch of scruffy crackers and horse thieves and half-breeds, who sat rotting in a cove in Kentucky for centuries, is more than I'll ever understand.” He slammed his door.