Proud Flesh (2 page)

Until that day in September when she was brought back from the garden in Eulalie's wagon, unconscious, blue in the face, her feet dangling over the sides and her heels scratching furrows in the dirt, the flaw in her heart had been Edwina Renshaw's close-kept, open secret. Whenever Doc Metcalf was called in to treat her for an attack he was made to swear to tell none of the children about it. Edwina's heart had been like a broken vase, so placed that the crack did not show, on a high shelf, out of her children's reach. To them only its good side was ever turned. The break, had they seen it, they would have blamed on their baby brother. They would have been right, and Edwina herself did blame him; but to allow the others to do so would have been to acknowledge the wrong she had done them, as well as the mistake she had made, in favoring that one child over all his brothers and sisters.

In September with the first touch of the sun the fields of cotton threw back heat into the air like a bed of white-hot coals. The breath came short and even sound hearts labored. And so Edwina had not waited for Eulalie that day but had gone down to the garden alone in the cool of the morning while there was still some shade. Derwent, her favorite grandson, was coming home on leave. Now in his second hitch (how those blackland prairie boys, born beyond all memory of the sea, all made for the Navy whenever there was any enlisting to be done! And how often the motive for enlisting was not patriotism but paternity!), Derwent remained an apprentice seaman in rank, and he always would. He had been promoted more than once; but always after a few weeks he was busted for insubordination or for a lead part in some shoreside brawl. Derwent never minded these demotions; on the contrary, they kept him young, a perennial boot, and they satisfied that rank-and-file pride in low, manly station of which Derwent had a large share. They kept him popular with the kind of girl he liked. The kind who preferred a tar, feeling too much on her good behavior with petty officers. He would come bringing his grandmother some doodad from some outlandish port which would have to be hidden from sight, and a shipload of dirty stories which she would squeal in protest against and laugh at until she cried. He would squire her downtown in his middy blouse and bell-bottomed trousers, his little white hat cocked on his brow, his rolling gait converting the square with its hunkering farmers into the deck of a gunboat in a running sea. It was to pick Derwent a mess of the butterbeans which were his favorite dish, and which he never got fresh on shipboard, that Edwina had gone down to the garden that morning. She was clutching a fistful of them when Eulalie found her an hour later lying pitched face down in the dirt.

II

Her reign had been Victorian in length, her sovereignty absolute, claiming allegiance at birth from all in whose veins a drop of her blood flowed. Whenever any of her sons foregathered away from home their first words were of her, like British colonial officers with their toast, “Gentlemen, the Queen. God bless her!” Spoiled, capricious, contrary, she had but to snap her fingers and those great unruly boys of hers, the terror of six counties, sprang to serve her like acolytes. To all her progeny in every generation she was “Ma”; that was a name which none of the grandchildren was permitted to call his own mother, just as none of her sons, no matter how long he might have lived in his own house or how many children had been born to him there, ever came to call the place “home.” Ma was Ma, and home was Ma's house.

Dutifully, unquestioningly, like offering them up to a religious order or to a draft call, her sons and daughters turned over their children to her—woe to the daughter-in-law who demurred! Beginning when they reached six and lasting through sixteen, the grandchildren each spent three weeks every summer with Ma down home on the farm. Cousins came to seem like brothers and sisters in the Renshaw family. They went as to a summer camp, with uniforms tailored to Ma's rigid taste and the unvarying season of outings she had planned, and her determination that none should feel any inequality in their parents' financial positions. For the girls, pinafores and shirtwaists cut to the pattern of her own distant childhood: two pink, two blue; skirts with hemlines precisely fifteen inches off the ground. And such was her domination that boys in the first hot flush of long trousers meekly suffered themselves to be put back into kneepants: two pairs white flannel, two of blue serge. At the County Fair on Labor Day, the summer's last excursion, they looked like a select, well-endowed orphanage, and she its directress, or, nunlike in her own habit-shaped black or gray dress, and nunlike in her severity—at least toward the girls—like its mother superior.

And so the farm came to be home for the grandchildren as well. It did not lack a man. There was unmarried Uncle Cliff, the one the whole family looked up to—though in middle-age he was a child, backward and tonguetied and countryfied, childishly good-natured when not in the throes of some childish tantrum and off somewhere pouting, who spent all his time with a pack of hounds and who knew where to find wild honey and the biggest blackberries and the best baits for catfish and when the bream were biting, but nothing more—because he was the one who had stayed with Ma and never left home.

But it was not in the summertime only that Edwina's daughters and daughters-in-law relinquished their sons to her. In the independence, the impudence, the sassiness which she fostered in a boy (her favorite endearment was “rascal”), they felt her between their sons and them the year round. With their daughters they were free to do pretty much as they pleased. Girls had only to meet certain negative requirements: to be chaste, demure, silent, and when the time came, long-suffering and uncomplaining toward some vagrant man of their own, preferably one chosen, certainly one approved, by Ma. It was boys Edwina cared about, and that they should grow into men. She knew what made a man. He must be braggardly and bold, touchy, trifling, headstrong, wild—obedient to no one in the world but her. They were glad to obey her. Pretending to disapprove, she egged on her grandsons as she had their fathers before them by winking at their escapades with girls, their recklessness with cars and horses and guns. She wanted them vigorous but idle. Polite but bawdy. Chivalrous but predatory. In a word: men.

Although widowhood now seemed her lifelong vocation, there had been a husband once … dust and a handful of anecdotes for twenty years: Lonzo (Alonzo), known behind his back as old Dot-and-Carry because of the hitch in his gait, not congenital but from a crippled big toe, broken, then disowned and neglected, grown gnarled as a brier root, in a kick he had given a calf that persisted in wishing to suck its mamma whom he was trying at the time to milk. Tame as a tabby cat with his wife, with all the rest of the world he had been quarrelsome, self-opinionated, abrasive. This tale was told of one fistfight he had gotten himself into. One day in a cafe in town he had hailed a man sitting on a stool at the far end of the counter as his long-lost friend Lew Pearsall, and stumped down to shake old Lew by the hand. The fat was in the fire when the stranger failed to lay down his knife and fork. Said he was afraid there was some mistake. His name was Selby, and he did not remember to have had the honor. Lonzo stood there with his empty hand stuck out. Perhaps one or more of the other diners snickered. Lonzo swore he never forgot a face, and reminded Lew of that night in Texarkana when together they—The stranger said he was afraid there was some mistake. Then Lonzo accused him of thinking he was too good for his old friends, said now that he came to think of it that was the sort he had always been, and called him by six or eight names which the stranger found even less acceptable than Pearsall, and which could only lead to the backalley behind the cafe, where finally the spectators had had to disarm Lonzo of the brass knuckles he happened to be carrying in his hip pocket at the time.

This readiness to fight a man over his own name was something the Renshaw boys had all inherited.

Perhaps old Dot-and-Carry had had to let off such an excess of steam outside the house because of being so bottled up at home, looking already in their faded sepia-toned wedding photograph which hung over the parlor mantelpiece—she enthroned upon a stiff ladder-backed chair and wearing not a bridal gown but one of those gray soutanes such as she was wearing on the day a half century later when struck down by illness—like the consort to a queen. Unremembered now in the lineaments of his offspring, in all of whom down to the fourth generation her pattern was distinct and assertive as the tartan of a clan: brown, almost black eyes, round-lidded, deep-set under shelving brows, a high ridged forehead, reddish-blond hair highly resistant to graying and balding, long sharp nose with narrow nostrils, short upper lip, overfull pouting lower one, the jaw heavy and a trifle undershot, and in the men a thick neck, thickly corded, with a gaunt Adam's apple like a knot in a rope. That, with allowances (though not many) for the difference in sex, was the image of her who now lay behind day-drawn shades in the upstairs bedroom of the big rambling yellow house on the hill.

People were inclined to feel that Alonzo Renshaw had been dead even longer than he had. In conversation his widow managed to convey the impression that she had raised, if not conceived, her ten children singlehanded. And it was true that even during her husband's lifetime she had been both mother and father to their boys, leaving to him the girls. She it was who regularly on the third Saturday of the month brought in her brood to be barbered. They would arrive punctually on the stroke of ten, and the barbershop would be emptied in expectation; for she sat through the entire shearing and her presence put such a damper on the customary male conviviality of the place that the customers, and even the shoeshine boy, retired to the backalley until her departure. They would line up in order of age: Clifford, Clyde, Ross, Ballard and Lester. At Mr. Birdwell's hands they all received the same monkish tonsure, but this never discouraged their mother from issuing a stream of directives for trimming each of her boys in such a way as to soften and flatter what she alone could discern as his individual features. On climbing down from the chair each had to submit to her running her hand through his hair to muss it up and give it a less newly-clipped look. He was then free to go outside and stand by the peppermint pole with his hands in his pockets until the rest of his brothers were done. A favorite Saturday morning pastime of other boys proud of their shagginess was to stroll past the barbershop and whisper something taunting, having reference to cueballs and peeled onions, to the accumulated Renshaw brothers around the pole, who, unable to respond beneath their mother's all-seeing eye, like so many Samsons shorn of their force, could only hiss an invitation to meet them later, an invitation seldom accepted, as the Renshaw boys fought all for one and one for all, and did not scruple to fight all five against one.

Anyone who bore the name Renshaw, no matter how remote the connection, could count on Ma's boys for help in time of trouble. Likewise he could count on hearing from them should he do anything to besmirch the name.

Once word reached the boys that Conway Renshaw, who lived in the neighboring county, had been dragging their proud name in the dirt. They called him Uncle though none knew exactly how he was related to them. Uncle Conway had recently opened a grocery store in a Negro neighborhood in his town. Through a sharp credit system he had in no time at all made such a good thing of it that already they were calling him “Nig” Renshaw, and a local wit had tagged him “the black man's burden.”

The Renshaw boys disapproved of this reputation for sharp practice which their kinsman had earned. However, it was not only that. And they could have lived with the notion of a Renshaw's living deriving wholly from Negroes, if only it had derived a little more indirectly. Association with Negroes was all right. They themselves passed time with Negroes, under certain outdoor sporting conditions. They all liked Negroes, liked some of them better than lots of white men they knew, and brother Clyde was even then evincing that preference for the company of Negroes which was to end by making him almost an alien from his own race. What stung was the thought of a Renshaw waiting on Negroes, serving them, taking orders from them, clerking to them, selling them intimate household items for petty cash, hand to hand, retail. And so a little vigilante party of Renshaw boys dropped in unannounced at the grocery store one busy Saturday afternoon. It was a hot summer day and Uncle Conway was doing a carnival-stand trade in RC Colas at seven cents a bottle (a nickel was the going price at the time). Black, or rather, work-worn, blackish-yellow, horny hands clamored for gingersnaps and vanilla wafers and bananas and canned sardines, all paid for with fistfuls of sweaty small change laboriously counted out of snap-top pocketbooks the length and the shape of socks—it looked, when they drew one out of their overalls pockets, as if they were extracting a vital body gland—and consumed on the premises while Uncle Conway filled their orders for the week's provisions, off-brand goods at marked-up prices to which was further added a carrying charge for credit. Uncle Conway professed himself mighty pleased to see the boys, and asked automatically after Ma. But the blood flew to his cheeks and he suddenly adopted a more distant manner toward his customers and they a more respectful one toward him. That was on a Saturday; the following Monday morning Renshaw's grocery failed to open its doors for business. Uncle Conway sold out that same week. Shortly afterward he re-emerged in the business world on a more genteel plane, taking on the local franchise for bottling a new brand of strawberry pop. This did not go over so he went into the feed and grain business, was set up in it by Ma's boys, said those who sided with them in this dispute.

Not everybody did. They were criticized for their highhanded interference in their uncle's affairs, and for that family pride which made them do it. Still, the same ones who blamed them had to concede that whenever any Renshaw was in trouble, or under outside attack, Ma's boys were there johnny-on-the-spot to help him out. The Renshaws were like hornets: tangle with one of them and you had the whole nest down upon you. Better be prepared to look the other way, turn the other cheek. For the Renshaws were never so quick to defend or avenge one of theirs as when he was in the wrong.