Tar Baby (11 page)

She hoisted a large pot of water onto the burning eye and wondered what he did with the head and feet. When the water was hot enough she dropped the chicken in and held it down with a wooden ladle long enough to loosen the pins. Then she removed it from the hot water and with newspaper spread out, started to pluck. She was still nimble at it but slower than she would have been if she wasn’t being careful about where the feathers went. A big nuisance to have to do it herself; it was going to make Sydney’s lunch late, but she didn’t feel up to seeing Yardman again, or giving him an order angrily, firmly or even sweetly. Yesterday everything was all right. The best it could be and exactly the way she had hoped it would be: a good man whom she trusted; a good and permanent job doing what she was good at for a boss who appreciated it; beautiful surroundings which included her own territory where she alone governed; and now with Jadine back, a “child” whom she could enjoy, indulge, protect and, since this “child” was a niece it was without the stress of a mother-daughter relationship. She was uneasy about the temporary nature of their stay on the island and Margaret’s visits always annoyed her—but it was being there that made Jade want to stay with them for a longish spell. Otherwise their niece would light anywhere except back in Philadelphia. She hoped Mr. Street would stay on in spite of his addled wife. Now here come this man upstairs in the guest room. Maybe Jadine was right, she thought, he would be gone today or, certainly, the next and they were making too much of it. Ondine stopped plucking and lifted her eyes slowly to the place where the window shutters did not quite close. A bit of the sky was unhidden by foliage. She thought she heard a small, smooth sound, like a well-oiled gear shifting. Not a sound really—more of an imagined impression, as though she were a dust mote watching an eye blink. There would be the hurricane wind of eyelashes falling through the air and the weighty crash of lid on lid.

Slowly she returned to the white hen in her hands. She was down to the pinfeathers when Sydney walked in with a small basket of mail.

“Already?” she asked him.

“No. I just thought I’d finish it up in here.”

“It’ll be at least an hour. Maybe two.”

“What are you doing that for?” He pointed at the pile of feathers on the floor.

“That’s the way I got it.”

“Call him. You want me to call him back here?”

“No. I’m just about finished now.”

“He knows better than that. Where is he?” Sydney moved toward the door.

“Sit down, Sydney. Don’t bother yourself.”

“I’m already bothered. I can’t run a house like this with everybody doing whatever comes to mind.”

“Sit down, I say. Hen’s done.”

He sat at the table and began sorting letters, circulars, magazines, and putting them into piles.

“Maybe we should look for somebody else. I’ll speak to Mr. Street.”

“It’s not worth the trouble, Sydney. Unless you can guarantee the next one won’t be worse. On balance, he’s still reliable and he does keep the place up, you got to give him his due.”

“You don’t sound like yourself, Ondine.” He looked at her heavy white braids sitting on her head like a royal diadem.

“Oh, I’m fine, I guess,” but her voice was flat, like a wide river without any undertow at all.

“I never heard you stand up for Yardman when he does something contrary to what you tell him.”

“I’m not standing up for him. I just think he’s a whole lot better than nobody and a little bit better than most.”

“You the one doing the plucking. I’m trying to make it easier for you—not me.”

“He
is
easier for me. I was just thinking how I used to be able to get my own yard hens. Not no more. If they tear loose from me, they free. I can’t chase em anymore. I don’t even know if I got the strength to wring their necks.”

“Well, what you don’t have the strength for, Yardman is supposed to do. I don’t want you running all over the yard after chickens. Killing them neither. We long past that, Ondine. Long past that.” He rested his hands on a letter for a minute as he recollected the bloody, long-legged girl in the back of Televettie Poultry sitting with three grown women, ankle deep in feathers among the squawks of crated fowl. At their feet two troughs of dead birds, one for the feathered ones, one for the newly plucked.

“I know, and we’re going to stay past it, too.”

“Not if you start changing up on me, we won’t. Not if you start letting people run over you. Start changing the rules in the middle of the stream.” He pushed the stack of magazines to one side.

Ondine laughed lightly. “You mean horse.”

“What?”

“Horse. Horse in midstream. Never mind. You know as well as anybody that I can handle Yardman and you also know that I’m not changing up on you. That’s not what you’re going on about. You’re edgy and I understand. That makes two of us. Three, I guess, since the Principal Beauty locked herself in. She call you for anything yet?”

“No. Not a thing.”

“Me neither.”

“Why three? Jadine ain’t bothered?”

“Not as far as I can see. She’s laughing and swinging around in that coat.”

“Damn.”

“She says we’re overdoing it. That Mr. Street’ll have him out of here today.”

“But what’d he do it for? She say anything about that? I been knowing him for fifty-one years and I never would have guessed—not in a million years—he do something like this. Where does he think he is? Main Line? Ain’t no police out here. Ain’t nobody hardly. He think that nigger came here and hid in his own wife’s bedroom just to get a meal? He could have knocked on the back door and got something to eat. Nobody comes in a house and hides in it for days, weeks…”

Ondine looked at her husband. Talk about changing up, she hadn’t seen him this riled since before they were married. “I know,” she said, “I know that, but Jadine says it was a joke; he had too much liquor and him and her had an argument and…” she stopped.

“…and what? Can’t finish, can you? No, ’cause it don’t make a bit of sense. Not one bit.”

“There’s no point in gnawing it, Sydney, like a dog with a bone. Swallow it or drop it.”

“Can’t do either one.”

“You have to. It ain’t your bone.”

“You have taken leave of your senses, woman. It is my bone and right now it’s stuck in my craw. I live here too. So do you and so does Jadine. My family lives here—not just his. If that nigger wants to steal something or kill somebody you think he’s going to skip us, just ’cause we don’t own it? Hell, no. I sat up in that chair all night, didn’t I? Mr. Street slept like a log. He was snoring like a hound when I went in there this morning.”

“He drank a lot, Jadine says.” She reached in the oven and poked a baking potato.

“Ain’t that much whiskey in the world make a man sleep with a wife-raper down the hall.”

“He didn’t rape anybody. Didn’t even try.”

“Oh? You know what’s on his mind, do you?”

“I know he’s been here long enough and quiet enough to rape, kill, steal—do whatever he wanted and all he did was eat.”

“You amaze me. You really amaze me. All these years I thought I knew you.”

“You’re tired, honey. You didn’t sleep hardly any at all with that gun in your lap, and carrying it around under your coat ain’t making things better. You really ought to put it back where it belongs.”

“Long as he’s in this house, it belongs with me.”

“Come on, now. It’s barely noon. Mr. Street’ll get rid of him just like Jadine said. Then everything will be just like it was.”

“Like it was? Like it was, eh? Not by a long shot. When I brought him his coffee and rolls, he never said a word. Just ‘More coffee, please.’ Ondine, it’s more than just being here, you know. I mean, Mr. Street had him stay in the guest room. The guest room. You understand me?”

“Well?”

“What do you mean, ‘well’?”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at.”

“Where do we sleep? Ondine?”

“Me and you?”

“You heard me.”

“We sleep where we’re supposed to.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s nice down there, Sydney. And you know it is: sitting room,
two
bedrooms, patio, bath…”

“But where is it?”

“Over there.”

“Over where?”

“Up over the downstairs kitchen.”

“Right. Up over the downstairs kitchen.”

“Jadine sleeps up there. With them.”

“Jadine? Now I am through. You comparing Jadine to a…a…stinking ignorant swamp nigger? To a wild-eyed pervert who hides in women’s closets? Do you know what he said to me?”

“‘Hi’?”

“Before that. When I was bringing him down the stairs under the barrel of my gun?”

“No, what’d he say?”

“Could he take a leak.”

“A leak?”

“A leak! I got him with his hands up and the safety off and he wants to stop and pee!”

“That’s nerve all right.”

“Nerve? He’s crazy, that’s what. You understand me? Crazy. Liable to do anything. And I have to show him to the guest room and lay him out some fresh pajamas. The guest room, right next to Jadine. I told her to keep that door locked and not to open it up for nobody.”

“You should have left it at that. You didn’t have to go creeping up there all night to make sure. Scared her to death.”

“Wait a minute. Whose side you on?”

“Your side, naturally. Our side. I’m not arguing for him. I told you last night what I thought about it. I just want to calm you down. He’s leaving, Sydney. But we’re not, and I don’t want no big rift between you and Mr. Street about where that Negro slept and why and so forth. I want us to stay here. Like we have been. That old man loves you. Loves us both. Look what he gives us at Christmas.”

“I know all that.”

“Stock. No slippers. No apron. Stock! And look what he did for Jadine, just because you asked him to. You going to break up with him, lose all that just because he got drunk and let a crazy hobo spend the night. We have a future here, as well as a past, and I tell you I can’t pick up and move in with some strange new white folks at my age. I can’t do it.”

“Nobody’s talking about moving.”

“If you keep working yourself up, you’ll rile him, or do something rash, I don’t know.”

“If I stay on here, I have to know whether—”

“See there? If. Already you saying if. Keep on and you’ll have us over in them shacks in Queen of France. You want me shucking crayfish on a porch like those Marys? Do you?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Then drop that bone. Drop it before it chokes you. You know your work. Just do what you’re supposed to do. Here. Take him his potato. Finish the rest of the mail later. Just give Mr. Street his. He likes to read it while he eats, if you call that eating. And Sydney? Don’t worry yourself. Remember, Jadine’s here. Nothing can happen to us as long as she’s here.”

S
YDNEY
went out with the tray on which a steaming potato in a covered dish was situated to the left of an empty wineglass, a napkin and a stack of mail. As the kitchen door swung on its hinges, Ondine took a deep breath. She had surprised herself. Before Sydney came in she was as nervous as he was. Still tasting her breakfast, too confused to quarrel with Yardman about the unplucked hen. She didn’t put any stock in Jadine’s assurances, but when Sydney looked like he was falling apart, she’d pulled herself together and talked sense. Good sense. That was what surprised her. She talked sense she didn’t know she had about a situation that both frightened and disoriented her. But in talking to Sydney she knew what it was. The man was black. If he’d been a white bum in Mrs. Street’s closet, well, she would have felt different. Sydney was right. It was his bone. Whether they liked it or not. But she was right, too. He had to drop it. The man upstairs wasn’t a Negro—meaning one of them. He was a stranger. (She had made Sydney understand that.) Mr. Street might keep him for two days, three, for his own amusement. And even if he didn’t steal, he was nasty and ignorant and they would have to serve him anyway, if Mr. Street wanted it. Clean his tub, change his bed linen, bring his breakfast to his bed if he wanted it, collect his underwear (Jesus), call him sir, step aside if they met him in the hall, light his cigarettes, hold open his door, see to it there were fresh flowers in his room, books, a dish of mints.

“Shoot,” she said aloud. “That nigger’s not going nowhere. No matter what they say.” Ondine picked up the chicken. Her fingers quickly found the joints they were searching for, and broke each one. Then she removed the wings from its back. The hen’s little elbows held a dainty
V
as though protecting its armpits from the cold although it was noon and the water the breakfast rain had left in the mouths of the orchids was so hot it burned the children’s fingers—or would have, if any children lived at L’Arbe de la Croix. But none did. So the stamens of the orchids went untickled and the occupants of the lovely breezy house with the perfectly beveled cabinets heard no children’s screams and no tramp of red soldier ants marching toward the greenhouse, past the washhouse where a woman sat rubbing the dirt from her feet with one of seventeen Billy Blass towels. Stacked before her in two wicker baskets were the other sixteen, some everyday table napkins and tablecloths, assorted underwear and T-shirts, four white uniforms, four white shirts, a corset, six pairs of black nylon socks and two thin cotton nightgowns. She was happy as she sat there cleaning her calluses. Her laundry load was getting smaller each week and the bundle of clothes that traveled by motorboat to Cecile’s in Queen of France was getting bigger and bigger. She knew quite well that she was supposed to be insulted by that, and when the opportunity arose she managed a pout, but in her heart of hearts she was happy.

She put the black socks in a bucket to soak and dropped the corset in a basinful of soapy water and vinegar. She made the Billy Blass towels the first load for the washing machine since they took longest to dry. Once the machine began to agitate she could sit for a while and attend to her own thoughts while she waited for Gideon to come by her. From the pocket of her dress she pulled two wrinkled avocados and some smoked fish and placed them on a piece of newspaper and covered it all against flies with a stained Dior napkin. Then she disconnected the dryer, plugged in her hot plate and set an old drip-pot of coffee on to heat. She had no assigned lunch hour so she ate while the laundry washed itself. It was such a pleasure. Washing for these people was child’s play compared to the way she did it on Place de Vent. But at least there she had the pleasure of gossip over the tubs; here there was mostly silence (unless you counted the music that came from the
serre chaude),
which is why she could hear the soldier ants so clearly and why she was so eager for Gideon to finish with the hens and join her on some pretext or other for if the heavy one with the braids crossed like two silver machetes on her head caught them chatting in the washhouse or in the garden behind, she would fly into a rage and her machetes would glitter and clang on her head. The silence was why she often brought Alma, and although the girl’s chatter was so young it made her head ache, it was better than listening to soldier ants trying one more time to enter the greenhouse and being thwarted as usual by the muslin dipped in poison and taped to the doorsill.