Such Sweet Thunder (10 page)

After a long while he recognized the island covered with bushes that separated the boulevard into two great thoroughfares. His heart gladdened, though anchored by the weight of a great fear.

Minutes later he was hobbling through the shoot. He paused wearily at the gate and glanced absentmindedly at his house. The lot of the empty house was completely cast in shade and the hole in the caved-in floor was silent, except for the buzz of flies.

He unhooked the gate and entered the yard. The shade of the houses and of the trees had cooled the concrete floor. He shot a glance upon the back porch. I forgot to lock the back door! Did I forget it? They’re
home!
He listened breathlessly. All was still.

Now he noticed the scraps of lumber, the nails, the saw, scattered about the yard. He quickly gathered them together, put them into the shed, and locked it. A stench rose from the sewer in front of Aunt Lily’s porch and flies swarmed around the thin stream of cloudy water that stood around its rim.

He stole quietly onto the porch. He spied the clean spot where the cat had died.

She isn’t home
yet!
Not yet! — looking at the sunlight falling across the screen to check the time. Not five o’clock
yet!
Unwilling to believe that the oblique ray of sunlight had not yet reached the hearthstone of the kitchen door.

Past the troublesome spot, he grasped the knob of the screen door and discovered — because he grazed his toe on the hammer — the
hole
in the screen! It was torn in the shape of an L and much larger than he had realized.

Maybe I can fix it. A slight wave of fearful resourcefulness caused him to pick up the hammer and hide it behind the orange crate. But then, as though the act of hiding the hammer had exhausted all that remained of his will to resist, he reflected that it was too late, and entered the kitchen.

The dirty dishes were on the table from lunch. He lethargically gathered them together and placed them on the drainboard, rinsing the wet dishcloth that lay in the sink where Viola had hastily thrown it. He
wiped the corn bread crumbs and the few drops of dried bean juice from the table and then took the broom and swept the fallen crumbs on the floor under the sink between the bottles of beer that Rutherford and Viola made every year.

Gradually a familiar cracking, popping sound came to his ears. He stood still and listened for a second, and perceived that it came from the front of the house. He hobbled into the front room. The pilot light on the radio was burning. He touched the radio; it was hot. Just as he turned it off the sound of the key in the lock of the front door. His heart pounded wildly.

Already!
He was surprised that he had not heard her foot on the stair. Viola entered the room. She wore a clean white apron. She looked exactly as she had looked at noon, except that now a bright fire danced in her eyes.

Why don’ she
say
somethin’?

She looked him fully in the face. Fear, guilt, and confusion harried his expression and turned down the corners of his mouth and filled the huge orbits of his eyes with tears.

Her eyes swept up and down his dirty little body. “You’re as filthy as a
pig!
” Tears rolled down his face, washing two paths through the dirt on either side of his face.
“Come here!”

He hobbled toward her, but stopped just beyond the range of her arms.

“I ain’ gonna hit you! You don’ have to be scaired a
me! Look at me!
” He looked into her eyes. “Miss Farnum said she saw you in the alley — bare-footed! — with Sammy Hilton. She said you threw a rock at her window, an’ when she chastised you, you
laughed
at ’er, an’ ran down on the avenue. Where’d you
go?
Can’t you
talk! I’ll
tell you where you went. You want me to tell you where you went? You was smack dab in the middle of them I-talians when that man got shot!”

How does she
know?

He looked incredibly at his mother.

Her lips trembled and now she began to cry.

“You didn’ know it was dangerous, did you! You just wanted to see a man
gittin’ shot to death!
An’ then, an’ then you wanted to have a look at the laundry where I work. Just-just curiosity, that’s all!”

She squeezed the brown paper sack she held in her arms to her breast. The paper turned dark brown where her arms pressed against it.

“That was all, wasn’ it?”

The bag burst. A thin trickle of tomato juice dotted with bright yellow seeds oozed down the front of her apron.

“An’ Amerigo? Whatever possessed you to go to the
soup line?
Well, this is one day you gonna remember for the rest of your life!” She trembled all over now. The sack slipped from her arms. Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. “Git in the kitchen!”

He hobbled into the kitchen, Viola following him. Blindly she took the strap from the toilet door and began to lash out at him, not seeing where she struck. Tears rained from her eyes. “You, you coulda been
killed!
” Whap! — “In the avenue! With all them cars, all the way
downtown!
Lookin’ like a tramp!” Whap! “What’ll people
think!
” Stinging blows landed upon his arms, upon his legs. He jumped up and down with pain, hobbling about the kitchen as well as he could to avoid the blows. She noticed his bruised foot. It bled freely, a thin trail of blood glistening on the floor.

“Ah! Your
foot!
Baby!” Whap! A stinging blow upon his rear, unable to stay the impulse that was already in motion before she noticed the blood. “You gotta promise me you won’ go away like that again! Me workin’ all day in that steamin’ basement to buy you clothes,
shoes
, an’
you
— like a
fool
— goin’
bare-
footed!” She started at the bleeding foot.

“Bra Mo, Aw-Bra Mo!” Mrs. Derby called from downstairs.

Viola dropped the strap to the floor, filled the teakettle, and set it on the stove. “Sit down, here, boy!” He sat on the edge of the chair. When the water was hot she poured some into the pan, added cold water until the temperature was right, and washed his feet. “You never done a thing like this in your
whole
life!” wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. When she had washed and dried his feet she painted the stubbed toe with iodine and bandaged it. This done she washed out the wash pan, poured in some fresh water, and washed his face and hands, scrubbing his neck and ears until he thought the skin would come off. When she was satisfied that he was clean she fished in her pockets and withdrew the “something nice” — a little bag of wineballs — she had promised him that morning and made him sit out on the back porch.

He sat on the orange crate — very quietly, penitently. He watched his mother wearily bathing her face in cold water. After that she disappeared into the front room and returned seconds later with the sack she had dropped and started supper.

It’s all over, he thought to himself. It’s all right again. He rubbed the welts on his arms. The hole in the screen door caught his attention. She hadn’t seen it yet. He looked up at the trees, he looked at the sky. A dirty stray dog meandered through the shoot and crossed the lot of the
empty house and sniffed in the hole as Sammy had done and snorted and ran through the shoot into the alley. He caught sight of Bra Mo coming through the shoot with a cake of ice on his shoulder.

Who’s that funny-looking man? He surprised himself with this thought, hearing now the high-pitched, snuff-soaked voice of Mrs. Derby nudging its way through her bloodred throat past two fine rows of even white teeth:

“Bra Mo! Aw-Bra Mo!”

That’s when she dropped the strap.

He plodded through the shoot and cut across the lot and paused at the gate long enough to shift his left hand to the handle of the tongs, which drew his left arm across his chest and caused his knuckles to stand out in bony ridges across the back of his small black hand, the fingertips of which were extraordinarily large and round, with nails of a light pink color. Like dolls with no clothes on. His old dirty cap hugged his head and sweat ran down his small oval face. There was a bulge like Mrs. Derby’s under his bottom lip, and his face looked like it was cut out of wet black stone.

Bra Mo grunted under the weight of the melting ice as he fastened the gate. Then he shifted his tongs to his right hand and crossed the yard dressed in sweat-wet blue overalls and heavy shoes. He shuffled down the steps past Aunt Lily’s door, shoulders bent, legs bent, eyes straining forward. Amerigo’s gaze followed him under the staircase into Mrs. Derby’s kitchen.

“Whew!” he exclaimed, opening the screen door.

He said that this morning! “Whew! Sho’ hope you don’ never have to work like this!”

“Sho’ is hot, all right!” said Mrs. Derby.

“You sho’ said
that
right!” said Bra Mo.

With a strange frightening detachment he heard the cake of ice grate against the metal rim inside the top part of the icebox with the metal lining painted white, flecks of silver showing through where the paint was peeling off. He smelled the wet soggy butter and cold water in the big bottle with the rusty grooves where you screw the top on, and little plates of leftover food: a grease-stained off-white paper containing a piece of fat bacon, a can of Carnation milk, a couple of eggs, a small can of lard, and half a cantaloupe.

“Looks like this heat ain’ never gonna let up!” Bra Mo was saying.

“Sho’ don’,” said Mrs. Derby, “but it don’ do no good complainin’, the Lord’s gonna have
His
way
anyhow!
”

He could mentally see Bra Mo taking out his dirty little blue book with its curled edges and its little stump of a yellow pencil with the blunt point, licking his black club of a forefinger with his sharp little red tongue and fingering until he came to a page with sprawling numbers, and as his heavy finger slowly ascended the column his brows arched, causing his smooth forehead to wrinkle. Then, wetting the point of his pencil with his tongue:

“Eh, that makes —”

“Put it on the book, Bra Mo,” said Mrs. Derby with a slightly embarrassed sweetness, “Mr. Derby’ll pay you Sad’dy. What does yo’ reck’nin’ come to?”

“That makes, eh, eh, a dollar an’-an’ sixty — a dollar-sixty!” with a triumphant smile.

“All right then,” said Mrs. Derby.

The screen door whined again and Bra Mo came out of the kitchen and ascended the steps to the yard with a lighter step. His long arms hung at his sides. He withdrew from his pocket a big blue print handkerchief and as he wiped his face, it took on a dull velvet tone that was very beautiful, Amerigo thought. Pleasantly surprised, he inspected his friend’s face more closely. He had a rather large nose with a high bridge that made him have to look up and out — over — at the world when his shoulders were not burdened with heavy cakes of ice or baskets of coal.

He looked up at Amerigo and grinned. His thin shapely lips drew away from his deep pink gums, revealing two rows of small fine white teeth, like corn on the cob.

“Whew!” His grin deepened. “Sho’ been hot taday, ain’ it, ’Mer’go? Boy, I could heah you sweatin’ clean out in the alley. Hee! hee!”

He dropped his eyes with embarrassment.

As soon as he had disappeared behind the empty house Mr. Derby appeared on his back porch. He swung a big wet gunnysack carefully from his back onto the porch floor, revealing a dark spot on his blue jumper where the sack had rested. As he shuffled into the house, his black rubber boots made a swishing sound on the worn hearthstone of the kitchen door.

He came out a few seconds later with three fishing nets and several bamboo fishing poles from four and a half to five feet long. He stood them in the far corner of the porch and hung the nets on a nail to dry.

One day I’ll be big enough to go crawdadding, he thought. The words sounded so strange that he imagined that he could see them, that
he could rub his finger through them, and that the white stuff would come off on his hands. Just then he heard Mr. Derby say:

“When you git high enough to stand waist-deep in three feet a muddy water I’ll take you. But you have to mind me boy, an’ do like I tell you. Then you kin go. ’T won’ be as long as you think — a couple a Fourth a Julys an’ Christmases or so — an’ you’ll be crawdaddin’ afore you know it!”

The words resounded as though he were hearing them from somewhere down the alley. Then suddenly thinking and talking stopped. He became all eyes because Mr. Derby was taking down the No. 3 tub that hung against the wall beside the kitchen window. Now he withdrew from his pocket a huge jackknife with a handle like the bark of a tree and cut the string around the neck of the sack. Then he grabbed the sack by the open, sagging end with one hand, grabbed hold of the bottom with the other, and tilted it so that the crawdads tumbled into the tub.

He watched the small grayish green crawdads scrambling futilely in the tub, their long feelers wavering, their sharp claws viciously biting the heads, legs, and tails of their neighbors. They all scrambled to reach the top of the pile, to gain the uppermost rim of the tub — to be free. The tub was so full that some of the big ones, which were almost six inches long and as round as Bra Mo’s thumb, almost escaped. But as soon as an apparently unnoticed one was about to get away, one of the others, which until then had also escaped notice, sometimes a little one not half as big, would catch him in his pincers by the tail or hind leg and pull him down again.

“People’s like that, boy,” said Mr. Derby without looking up: “Just like a mess of crawdads.” He nodded agreement to the back of his old brown hat knowing that the man whose attention was bent upon his work had seen him nod.
How
does he know? Amerigo looked at the sky, at the trees, at a cloud floating just above Mrs. Crippa’s roof; they all nodded, too.

Mr. Derby was spreading his sacks out on the floor of the yard near the garbage can to dry. Then he stepped into the kitchen and returned immediately with a big can of salt. He poured it over the squirming crawdads:

“That’s to make ’um puke,” said Mr. Derby.