Proud Flesh (15 page)

Then he would say, “Not a lawyer in this town would touch it. Not a judge would hear it.”

White lawyers, that meant. The town had two colored ones. One was counsel for the plaintiff, the other for the defense, in disputes—nearly all settled out of court in the office of one or the other of them—among the colored people of the town. The revolutionary notion of going to one of them and becoming his first white client would then pass through her mind. Would pass rapidly through and out of her mind. If no white lawyer was going to risk making himself unpopular by pleading her case, no colored one was going to risk being run out of town.

“Now let's go back a bit,” he would say. “If a divorce is what you're interested in, why, like I say, nothing is easier.”

But she would not have worked herself up to brave the disgrace, the derision, the ostracism that she would face only now to take refuge in a charge of mental cruelty, incompatibility. A divorce was not all she was after now. She had been humiliated beyond bearing, she had been defiled by his mere touch, and the man must pay though it meant she pay along with him. She had already paid. For her it was enough that one person knew, and she had now told one. Had told one in whose face she could see how deeply she was disgraced. He could not conceal the disrespect he felt for a woman whose husband had left her for a colored woman.

No, she would say, a divorce was not all she wanted. Then his look would be one not of disrespect but disgust. Then she would see that his distaste was not for what her husband had done to her but for what she was proposing to do to him. Against a woman so demented by hatred and lust for revenge he would stick by someone he disliked as much as he did Clyde Renshaw. There was a code to govern a woman's conduct in just her situation, and she had violated the code. Convention decreed that she feign blindness to what had been done to her. She was not up against the world of lawyers but of men. When she came downstairs and out into the sunny square she would feel that there was nothing left for her to do but go home and kill herself. Then she would feel that that was not left for her to do.

Thus on the following morning would end what would begin in the night. When, desperate, he crossed the neutral space of bed between them to his lawfully wedded wife and, saying to himself, beggars can't be choosers, laid lover's hands on her for the first time in four years. Saying, he provided her with a roof over her head and a car of her own, three square meals a day and money to spend on clothes as though there was no tomorrow, and for this what did he get in return? He had his legal rights. She didn't have a thing on him. He had admitted to nothing, had said nothing, on that weekend three years ago. And, using the same words he used to excuse himself with her opposite number, that in the dark they all looked alike.

XIX

“Cause it's mine. That's why. I'm going to need it for my old age, when I won't have nobody to take care of me.”

He was responding to a question, or rather a taunt, from one or another of four people: Shug, Mr. Clyde, Ed Bing or Mr. Joe Bailey. The four people who boxed in his life like the walls of a cell, one of them always blocking him no matter which way he turned. The only people who ever spoke to him, they spoke only to taunt or to curse him. One or another of them, it did not matter which, had just said, “Jug, goddammit, what the hell do you need with that money anyway?” “It's mine. I earned it. I earn every nickel I get.”

“Held out up to now,” he said, replying to the question, “How much longer do you think your liver is going to hold out?” which had followed after, “Your old age? How much older do you think you're going to
get
?” “Held out up to now.”

The year's crop of hay had been dug, peanut hay, dug with the nuts attached, from clay soil, dry now, so that there was dust in the air of the loft. God keep him from one of his sneezing fits. He could feel beginning to set in that stiffness of the joint where his skull and backbone met, which came, strangely enough, both when he was very drunk and when he was very dry, forerunner of a headache always, and which caused him such stabbing pain whenever he was seized by one of the sneezing fits he had been subject to for the past couple of years. He was up to nineteen sneezes, his record for a single bout, each one requiring that he blow his nose to keep from drowning, so that he was left dehydrated and limp from exhaustion. God keep him from one of those fits now. For it sounded when he got going like rapid-fire rifle practice, loud enough to be heard by everybody within three axle-greasings. God help him if anybody, meaning Mr. Clyde, should learn that he had spent the night here instead of at home where he was supposed, though he had never been told this, never needed to be told, to be chaperon to his wife, Clyde's woman.

The door of the barnloft had been taken off for ventilation so that in curing, the hay would not set itself on fire. It was hot in the loft from the heat of the curing hay. From his place in the hay he saw the last light go out in the big house. Instantly inside his head a neon light flashed on saying,
OPEN ALL NIGHT
! Steel balls bounced off the walls of his skull, dropped into holes, tapped out scores while colored lights popped. A warped record on a nickelodeon played at top volume a medley of comic drunkard's songs. Show me the way to go home I'm tired and I want to go to bed I had a little drink about an hour ago and it went right to my head how dry I am how dry I am nobody knows how dry I am yo ho ho you and me little brown jug how I love thee hand me down my bottle of corn and I'll get drunk as sure as you're born for all my sins are taken away taken away …

A little drink was all he had had, and it was more than an hour ago. What he had had to drink was just enough to raise a thirst. All he had drunk was a pint of Bing's Tea, as it was known among the colored population of the county: a mixture of equal parts of caramel-flavored California sherry and sulphur-flavored water from Ed Bing the bootlegger's artesian well. It was Jug's fate to be a drunkard in a dry county.
Ed Bing:
that had ceased to be a man's name and became a trademark, so that it was all right for Jug to think of him that way, and even to call him that to his face, omitting the “Mister.” Mr. Joe Bailey had administered that pint of watered wine to him in homeopathic doses, trying to prime the pump of his memory. It had worked sometimes. Total amnesia would blanket his brain like dust, obliterating all his recent footprints, but a sprinkling of Ed Bing's adulterated sherry falling upon it would reveal them and he could retrace his steps to the very spot where he had hidden that money three, four or five days earlier. It had not worked today, and Mr. Joe Bailey was running out of patience, and credit. He had hot been paid his bill in a month.

“And suppose I was to? Then where would you be? Who would you get to take my place?” he asked Mr. Clyde, who had said, “Instead of hiding half of your money and then not being able to find it again, why don't you drink it all up and get it over with once and for all instead of this slow drowning in the stuff?” “Nobody. That's who. If you don't know it then let me tell you. Not another man would put up with what I do. Is it any wonder if I take a little drink from time to time?”

“I must have been. I must have been otherwise I wouldn't have,” he said. This was in response to Mr. Clyde's saying, “You had been drinking for twenty-five years when you came here. You were drunk when you agreed to it.” “I must have been,” he said. Below him the cows snuffled and blew snorts and rattled the bars of their stanchions. He heard from time to time the plop of their dung on the barn floor.

“No, I can't. Not any more. And you know it. It was a time when I could have. But now I got too much money on this place to leave. Until I find it.”

He had led Mr. Joe Bailey around today making a show of looking for the money in order to get that watered wine, and vaguely hoping, as he always did, to stumble upon the hiding place, or if not it, then one from some other of the many weeks when he had been unable to find it afterward. He had tried to shame Mr. Joe Bailey, saying this was no time to come dunning him when there was sickness on the place. But this, the third straight week that he had been unable to find his money, was the fourth straight week that his bill at Bailey's Gen'l Store had gone unpaid. Jug's one creditor (Ed Bing, whose second best customer Jug was, only Ross Renshaw being a better one, would not have let him have a drop on credit if he were in the throes of delirium tremens), Mr. Joe Bailey said of Jug, “He ain't a bad nigger. Drinks, yes, but knows his weakness and makes provision accordingly. He'll pay me what he owes me as soon as he finds where he's put his money.” This did not keep Mr. Joe Bailey from cursing Jug to his face; it was how he explained to others his willingness to lend credit to somebody to whom nobody else would. Sometimes it might take Jug a little longer than at other times, but sooner or later he always did find or suddenly remember where he had hidden that half of his weekly pay from himself so that when he woke up thirsty he would not be able to go on drinking.

“My daddy kept his in a saving account once. 1932. And I had a friend once that kept his in a bank that the president embezzled everything in it.”

But with the passage of time Jug had used up a great many hiding places. It got harder and harder for him to outsmart himself. For also with the passage of time his thirst grew, making him more desperate, more determined, and thus more clever at finding his money when he came to, mouth parched, head splitting, stomach heaving, on Monday morning. Also he had to change his hiding place often to keep others from finding his money. Sometimes he did find it while drunk and then he was drunk all week long. This affected his memory. For these reasons now about every other week Jug was unable to find where he had hidden that seventeen dollars and fifty cents. Once or twice while looking for what he had hidden the Friday before, Jug found money he had hidden weeks, even months before. Generally, however, if not found the following week the money was never found.

“They after it, all right. Ain't I been up now all night for three nights chasing them off? All day long trying to find it my own self, then up all night trying to keep them cottonpicking thieves from finding it. Yeah, they looking for it.”

Among the local Negroes and among the annual migrant workers estimates of the amount of Jug's money buried like a dog's meatbones around the Renshaw place ran into the thousands of dollars. It was universally held that as its original owner had had his chance and failed to find it, this money now belonged to whomsoever did. Time had reclaimed this wealth and made it into a natural deposit, the prize of him who was smart enough, and hard-working enough, to find it.

Show me the way to go home … He had been hoping without much hope that tonight she would take pity on him. She could when it suited her. Though she knew how to make being kind to him more bitter than when she was out to devil him. She could be as cruel as a cat and drive him out of the house and when he came home drunk he might wake to find that she had undressed him and put him to bed and bandaged a cut he had gotten somehow and that she had done him that kindness than which to a drunk there is none greater: left him a shot by the side of the bed for when he came to with the shakes. Then when he tried to thank her she would laugh a laugh that split his head and say she knew nothing about how he had gotten to bed, that in his drunkenness he had put himself to bed without knowing it. Before she would put him to bed he could sleep in the gutter for stray dogs to piss on him. If a car was to run over him there and kill him she would dance at his funeral.

It was not just for his drinking that Shug was punishing him when she drove him out of the house. It was not just for his part in their three-way arrangement. It was for knowing what he knew about her. Not his knowing about her carrying-on. That in his up-all-night out-all-day patrol of the property to find or to protect his hidden money he had seen things, things he alone had seen. She was not afraid of his telling Mr. Clyde what he knew. She knew he never would tell, but that was because he was afraid of Mr. Clyde; she would not have cared if he had. She was not afraid of that straight razor Mr. Clyde wore on a string around his neck, and which she must have seen every time he took his shirt off. She probably lusted to have him cut a man over her. There were women like that and she was one of them if ever there was one. No, what Shug could not forgive him for was knowing her secret, although she herself had revealed it to him, had, in fact, forced it on him against his will. He had troubles enough of his own. He wanted only a quiet life and money enough to get soused on weekends, not choosey even about his poison, grateful for the rawest rotgut. He did not want to know anybody's secrets. Especially not a woman's. Especially not anything involving a woman and white folks. Especially when the white folks involved was the man on whom he was dependent for that quiet life, that weekly souse. Certainly he could not be of any help to her with her problem. But nobody could be of any help to her, and there he was, in the house, available, a man old enough to be the father she did not have to turn to, legally, if only legally, her husband. To whom else could she lay bare her heart? To whom else try to explain what she could not explain to herself: that she loved the man who had raped her? At least, rape was what it was called when it happened to a white girl—what to call it in her case she did not know. That she loved him because of what he had done to her. Not just because he had forever in his keeping the trophy of her maidenhead, but because in cutting her off from her family, from her people, from the children she might have had, he had left her with no one but him to love.

He was tired and he wanted to go to bed. Tonight he had reached the point where he did not care if somebody else found and stole his money and he was hoping she would take pity on him, that is, ignore him. She could see by looking, anybody could, what state he was in. He was filthy, he stank. Lack of sleep and the need of a drink made his eyes smart and water continually and his hands to shake uncontrollably. He was hoping for a bath and a shave and a night's sleep in bed. Or rather, on the living room couch which was his bed. He had never needed to be told that the double bed in the bedroom was as much off-limits to him as was the downstairs at the picture-show even though the Colored sign had been taken down from over the door leading to the balcony. He had not even needed to tell Mr. Clyde that he understood this without being told. No provision of the understanding between them had had to be spoken.