Proud Flesh (6 page)

The third in the row was one of the quonset huts. A gust of fetid air flew in his face on his opening the door. On the bed lay not she and some lover her own color but a row of half a dozen pinky-brown children, napping, covered with flies like raisin-sprinkled gingerbread men. Beside the bed in an armchair the entrails of which hung out in loops, a withered and shriveled black woman slumped asleep, her open mouth exposing one long yellow tooth in each bright pink gum. Always there was one like her, delegated to look after the infants. One eye fell open. “Looking for somebody?” she asked. “All out yonder picking yore cotton.”

In the last shack he entered and passed through the kitchen where on the table lay the remains of breakfast—blackened banana skins and fish bones and Vienna sausage tins—and stepped into another bedroom where memories of their assignations again inflamed him. The air was unbreathable. He could hear the pickers' dirge, recalling him to his errand. His heart choked with self-loathing and self-pity. It cried out for purity—if not for unadulterated sorrow then for pure unmixed lechery. But the loneliness of his spirit only whetted the craving of his flesh.

Where was she? Where was that two-timing bitch? Suddenly he knew, and crazed with jealousy and longing he lunged across the room to the clothes closet. With one hand he grasped the doorknob, with the other the razor underneath his shirt. He visualized her, or rather them, crouching on the floor behind the hanging clothes, naked together and black together, black as the darkness that enveloped them, waiting for the sound of his departing footsteps. Blindly he yanked open the door. On the rod hung three bent and empty clothes hangers. Stirred by the wind they tinkled together like distant laughter. Along the floor the gray dustmice scurried toward the corners.

VII

In their younger years the Renshaw boys had run together in a pack—on Saturday afternoon when they came swaggering into the public square five abreast taking up the entire sidewalk people had flown out of their way like chickens—and they were still close; but, left more to their own devices in growing up, the sisters were more individual, and each had been conscious at an earlier age of the instinct to leave home and set up for herself. There were greater differences among them, and more differences arose between them, differences which they learned to settle themselves without appeal to Ma, whose impartiality amounted almost to indifference. Not so with the boys. With them too her verdict was impartial; but after the dispute was settled, the private comfort she gave to the one who had been in the wrong amounted almost to preference. When it came to boys, Ma was apt to equate being in the wrong with being the underdog.

On one thing, though, in opposition to their brothers, the Renshaw girls were united, or had been until all were married and gone from home. This was precisely the question of their getting married, and accounted for their being so widely scattered now, compared to the boys. The Renshaw boys had positively Sicilian notions about a brother's duty to his sisters' reputations, and were all the more vigilant after the death of their father. Local boys had been rather unforward in coming to court any of the girls, and as the girls said in complaining to Ma, you could hardly blame the fellows. A fellow does not want to be made to feel obligated to propose after taking a girl out a time or two, nor to be bullied by a gang of her brothers, maybe marched to the altar with a shotgun at his back, on bringing her home past midnight once. After calling and being watched, slit-eyed, by two or three, sometimes all five of the Renshaw boys, most suitors failed to call again. For unfortunately, though they were all what is called nice-looking girls, none of the sisters was quite handsome enough to inspire any local boy to run that gauntlet a second time. The girls charged that their brothers' concern for their reputations was incidental to the fun they got from scaring hell out of the various bouquet and bon-bon laden youths bold enough to come sniffing around their warren. There was ugly talk once, never fully substantiated, as the only witness was the alleged victim, of a premature kiss, a midnight ride, a beating. It began to look as if the girls might all be left to wither on the vine. All had ended by marrying beyond the adjacent counties, beyond the range of their brothers' notoriety, and in each case Ma's connivance had been needed in arranging clandestine meetings enough to bring the suitor to the desired point. In the case of one, namely Gladys, the young man had been backward, and him Ma brought round by disclosing to the boys that he was seeing their sister.

The first of the girls to arrive now was Hazel.

Admiring liberality and despising thrift as they did, the Renshaws found the sight of their sister Hazel—leaner, shabbier, more packrat-looking each time—always an embarrassment. Despite her upbringing in that prodigal family, Hazel was a miser, a true miser, and proud of it. Not just proud of her wealth, the size of which she alone (and least of all her husband, Troy) knew, nor just of her acumen in amassing it, but proud like a fanatic, a member of a cult, despising all those who do not know the truth. She relished the contradiction between the way she lived and looked and the way she might have lived and looked if she had wanted to. Hazel knew that people despised her for her stinginess. She relished that, too. She enjoyed being despised. It added to her sense of superiority.

Hazel loved money. Loved crisp crinkly new green bills, thick silver dollars with their milled and serrated edges that fell together with a ripe and solid
clunk;
her love of property took a mannish turn. Like her father before her (like her mother, too; for her mother too had the Southern country man's attitude in this) property meant to Hazel real property: houses, land. She had begun buying years ago: ramshackle rental bungalows, dilapidated duplexes in run-down neighborhoods, Negro shanties. She sold a few, traded a few, always turning a profit, and bought more. Meanwhile she grew leaner, shabbier, more secretive and apart, mistrustful, sly. She declined invitations so as not to have to return them. She scrimped her family, serving them stale and sometimes moldy bread bought in large lots from the back doors of bakeries; for meat served them the cheap inner organs, the lights of animals: the lungs, hearts, heads—after a while ceased serving them meat altogether. At thirteen, to teach them the value of money, her sons began paying for their keep; as their earnings rose so did their room and board. The house had the atmosphere of the meanest boardinghouse. A light left burning in an empty room or a faucet found dripping, a bar of soap left to melt on a wet dish could curdle the family atmosphere for an entire day.

Hazel had made herself the family's unfavorite. Her first spoken sentence had been a complaint. She was like a music box: the same tune every time she opened up. She did not quarrel, did not stand up for her rights, as members of a large family all must, and after a while she learned not even to assert them; she just looked done out of them, put-upon, orphaned. And she had a genius for contriving to be left out. It was she for whom at the last minute there was no room in the car. If at dinner there was one gristly or overdone or underdone portion of the meat Hazel got it, and declined all offers to exchange. The worm in the salad, the pebble in the peas, Hazel bit on them. In everything she made herself her sisters' unwanted drudge and second-fiddle. If originally this Cinderella manner of hers had been meant, consciously or unconsciously, to win affection and concessions, it had long ago become an end in itself. She found more enjoyment in being wronged than she found in having her wrongs righted. As her mother once said, to err is human, to be forgiven by Hazel is divine.

They came now in their ancient Dodge, she at the wheel, sacrificing the dilapidated old conveyance in her double haste—anxious for her mother but with her nose in the wind, scenting her mother's will. Leaving her husband outside with the men, she hurried into the house. And her brothers turned back to face their neighbors expressionless. They stuck together. She was one of theirs. And theirs was a clannishness remarkable even in a place noted for clannishness.

Next came Lois, alone, in the brave, too brave, desperately gay weeds of her grass-widowhood, a fluffy little meringue of a hat, and in that new red convertible bought to celebrate her divorce decree which made of her a show like a float in a parade or like the entire navy of, say, Bolivia, and she its sole admiral. Lois asked the same questions everyone asked, as to what had been done for Ma, contriving somehow to suggest that nothing could have been done right in her absence. A chronic nag with a small insistent voice like a mosquito's, tricked by life and unforgiving, she lived in a state of unflagging resentment which even her divorce, that condition for which she had lived as a life-term prisoner lives for a parole, had failed to assuage.

Lois had married latest of all the sisters, at an age when already she had been consigned to be the family's one old maid, already an aunt many times over by then and seemingly an aunt by nature and disposition, already by that time her mother's principal confidante and destined by general supposition to be the companion of Ma's widowed years. She had married after two weeks' acquaintance a good-natured, unambitious, live-and-let-live boy some years her junior with an hereditary tendency to drink and dominoes. Two weeks later she presented for her mother's signature the bill of annulment. To her mother, whose creed was that marriage was a vow as unalterable as a nun's. One month later she stood for the second time before the same justice of the peace with the same slightly tipsy bridegroom and went through the same spiel as before, this time making a cold furious mental reservation upon every word uttered, promising herself neither to love, honor
nor
obey him but to make his life a daily bed of nails, not till death did them part, but until a day (the exact date she would know some eight months hence) sometime in March of 1962, the child's eighteenth birthday—unless she (the child, that is; for Lois was certain it would be a girl: that too would be a part of her bad luck), unless she married before that time despite all her mother could do to poison her mind against that step.

She bore the child and weaned it—or rather, her; for it was a girl—and that was one year done. And nursed her through whooping cough followed by double pneumonia, learning in the process to forgive her her existence and to live for her and her alone, waiting on her hand and foot ever afterward and spoiling her so as to make her unfit to be any man's wife, which only made the man who married her all the more uxorious, and that was two years done. And bringing her safely through all the other childhood diseases, not one of which she was spared, and taking her to Sunday school and dancing and piano and elocution lessons and sending her off to kindergarten, and that was five years done, going on six. And found herself pregnant again by legal rape and had to start all over from scratch. This time she told him her plan, once, quietly, and endured his mumbled and confused self-apology and never mentioned it again but saw her daughter married and settled and the boy through school, or through as much of it as he could stick, then off to his military duty, and when he was discharged and immediately married, instructed the lawyer whom she had apprised of her intentions on the day of her remarriage, to proceed with her suit for divorce, looking at him as if he was crazy when he ventured to say he had forgotten about it and supposed she had too, when he said he would have thought she might have changed her mind after all these years, might have grown reconciled, might even have come to feel some attachment to the man with whom she had lived half her life.

That was three months ago and this homecoming was Lois's first since then. She had not dared face Ma's disapproval, and now, full of contrition, blaming herself for their mother's illness, she could hardly face her sisters and brothers.

After Lois came Gladys, with her husband Laverne, from Nacogdoches. They were followed by Ross's girls and their husbands and babies, having done the hundred and fifty miles from Fort Worth in not much over two hours. Calls were received from others en route, but none from Amy. But it was known in the family that Amy's husband Ira was timid at the wheel and would not let Amy drive, complaining that she was worse than her Barney-Oldfielding brothers. And truly, to hit ninety-five or a hundred on a straightaway was nothing for white-haired Amy, the first-born child. Hazel's girls, April, May and June, all married and living in and around Corsicana, arrived, and her boys Ben and Arthur, in business together over in Terrell. Ross's Eugene, Harlan and Elwood came, the first two from Kerens, the other from Waco, where he was stationed. Clyde's Bryan came from Marshall. Lois's Gwyn arrived. Glenn and Hugh Childress came from Henderson. Uncle Fred, Aunt Inez and Uncle Seth came from Gladewater; Uncle Cameron and Aunt Beulah, Uncle Quincy, Uncle Monroe, Uncle Leon and Aunt Velma, Aunt Belle and Aunt Flora all came over from Carthage. Uncle Ed and Aunt Lillian came from Big Sandy. Cousin Herschell Kimbrough came from Clarksville, Cousin Calvin Renshaw from Commerce. The Cartwrights came, Duane, Ella and Mae, from Conroe. From Brenham came Cousins Bessie and Meade Vance and Cousins Raymond and Peggy Allen. From Temple came old Cousin Stacey Daingerfield and Uncle Roy Tayloe, who was certainly not an uncle whatever he was, but was too old to be called anything less. Cousin Travis Ledbetter came from Mabank, bringing Aunt Lola and Uncle Dave. But only last week poor crippled old Aunt Nan had taken to her bed for good. They would all be going down to Kilgore to bid her farewell soon.

And so one by one the Renshaws all came home, all but one, and that one was not going to come.

VIII

“Junya Price,” said the owner of the name, and doubling his sack, hung it on the hook of the scale. He was bare to the waist: prompt young muscles bunching beneath a skin as glossy as an eggplant's.

Clyde found the name in his daybook. Was Junior Price the one? Junior, the record showed, had picked a lot of Clyde's cotton. What else of Clyde's, after hours, was Junior picking? Given the day off with pay in observance of Ma's condition, with money of Clyde's in the pockets of his impudent skin-tight jeans while he, Clyde, sat tied to his own shadow beneath the pear tree—where, how, with whom would Junior spend his day?